Suicide

Someone recently asked me for some reflection on the subject of suicide. Suicide is a fact, so it must have a reality which supports its being in existence. The question is: what’s the purpose of suicide in terms of self-knowledge?

It’s not the body that commits suicide (the body is never consulted) – it’s the self within the body which compels a person to take the action. People rarely commit suicide on the spur of the moment. What usually happens to someone who’s reached a point where suicide is seriously being considered is an absence of experience. This is because the emotional turmoil within has been wrung dry to create an arid wasteland where the isolation from the world has reached its nadir.

The prospect of suicide is appealing to the self as a way of participating in an intensity of experience beyond normality. This can be as a consequence of a long-lasting depression or an event in which there appears to be no way out. The possibilities are endless. (I’m not talking of voluntary euthanasia here, which is a different thing altogether.)

Whatever it is that drives a person to commit suicide, they take with them at death. Although there’s a temporary relief of emotional intensity and pressure, the fundamental cause will have to be addressed during the after-death process. No-one is to blame, but where possible it’s best to confront any difficulties and traumas while alive and to see them through without resorting to suicide. All actions, including suicide, must ultimately be accounted for as individual karma within the great cyclic process of life and death.

Suicide is an extreme effect of the human condition of pain and suffering. Whatever externalises through the overall effect of humanity’s unhappiness is similarly flawed as the ignorance of life’s purpose. The purpose of suicide is to shatter the dream of existence, not for the one who takes their own life but for those who must pick up the pieces in their grief and carry on living. Suicide is but one way devised by life or God to bring the sleeping daze of human beings to an awakened state of mind.

There is no death, only life. The death of the body changes nothing – it’s only the domain that is different. Ultimately I in every body am life, and responsible for life as a being of the earth. At death I take with me what’s been gathered as experience in the living process. Incredibly, this is just the introduction to reality as the great mystery of life.