I want to also add another consideration here. As it happens, I Just came across this passage after my last comment.Freefrommainstream wrote: ↑ ...
Steiner (1923) wrote: The Mysteries of Hibernia, the Irish Mysteries, were in existence for a long time. They were still there at the time of the foundation of Christianity... Let me give you a picture of the experiences of a person who was initiated into the Irish Mysteries. Before he was able to receive the initiation he had to be strictly prepared; the preparation that had to be undergone before entering the Mysteries was always in those times of extraordinary strictness and rigour. The important thing in the Hibernian Mysteries was that the pupil should learn to become aware in powerful inward experience ofthat which is illusory in his environment, — in all the things, that is to say, to which man attributes being on the ground of his sense-perception. Then he was made aware of all the difficulties and obstacles which meet man when he searches after the truth, the real truth. And he was shown how, fundamentally, everything which surrounds us in the world of the senses is an illusion, that what the senses give is illusion, and that the truth conceals itself behind the illusion, so that in fact true being is not accessible to man through sense-perception.
Now, very likely you will say that this conviction you yourselves have held for a long time; you know this quite well. But all the knowledge a man can have in the present-day consciousness of the illusory character of the sense-world is as nothing compared with the inner shattering, the inner tragedy that men of that time suffered in their preparation for the Hibernian initiation. For when one says theoretically in this way: Everything is Maya, everything is illusion, — one takes it quite lightly! But the training of the Hibernian pupils was carried to such a point that they had to say to themselves: There is for man no possibility of penetrating the illusion and coming to real true Being.
The pupils were by this means trained to content themselves, as it were in desperation, with the illusion. They came into an attitude of despair: the illusory character, they felt, is so overpowering and so penetrating that one can never get beyond it. And in the life of these pupils we find always the feeling: Very well then, we must remain in the illusion. That means, however: we must lose the very ground from under our feet. For there is no standing firm on illusion! In truth, my dear friends, of the strictness and severity of the preparation in the ancient Mysteries, we to-day can scarcely form any idea. Men shrink in terror before what inner development actually demands.
Such was the experience that came to the pupils in regard to Being and its illusory character. And now there awaited them a similar experience regarding the search after Truth. They learned to know the hindrances man has in his emotions that hinder him from coming to truth, all the dark and overwhelming feelings that trouble the clear light of knowledge. And so once more they came to a great moment when they said to themselves: If Truth is not, well then we live — we must live — in error, in untruth. For a man to come thus to a time in his life when he despairs of Being and of Truth means, in short, that he tears out of him his own humanity.
All this was given in order that the human being, through experiencing the opposite of what he was finally to reach as his goal, might approach that goal with the right and deep human feeling. For unless one has learned what it means to live with error and illusion, then one cannot value Being and Truth. And the pupils of Hibernia had to learn to value Being and Truth.
So you see, the understanding of nothingness, in the way you are also conveying it here, has been around for many millennia. It is an extremely important insight to have. Your insight via depressive states can be very valuable in the path to spiritual freedom, IF you don't stop reasoning there or endeavoring to accumulate more experience. The experience of nothingness, the futility of reaching truth through sense experience, had never existed as an end-in-itself until the modern age, when practically everything, every conceptual system and every state of being, came to be considered the full and final expression of Truth and Being. This includes the state of "Being is illusion and we need to stop seeking after it." It is simply the flip side of the same coin, a polarization to the Nouth instead of South pole.