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The presence of ego or 'thinking too much' is being 'there', naming and pointing out things when you don't have to. It's thinking about how you swing the golf club or swing the racket while you do it.

What you see around you is literally lit up by light rays around you converging onto your eye. When the rays are straight, it feels like fireworks or the suns rays. When they're squiggly, it feels like a tentacle blob.

When ego is unclean, it distorts those rays. That distortion comes from trying too hard to interpret the environment. E.g. trying to get reality to fit into the mental model instead of changing the mental model to fit reality.

Depression is the seeing the distorted rays but it solves the problem incorrectly. Instead of re-focusing the lens, the light is turned off. Surviving depressions gives you new perspective because you had to find an original source to have escaped.

Having seen 'true' fire you now have a touchstone with which to recognize and reject distortions. You can fall into another type of depression where you don't realize that you yourself are the source of those distortions.

The first type of depressions leads to being dark and emo. The second type leads to being overly bright and guru-ish.

As a 2x2: Radiant and Distorted Radiant and Non Distorted Dark (The distortion doesn't matter when it's dark)

The point is not to change your level of radiance, e.g. how famous you are, how much "you" is seen by others. It is to remove the distortion, which can be done at any level of radiance.