Mushyosh,

Hello.  Suicide crosses a boundary - a survival instinct we are all born with.  Usually it is considered out of despair. You are your thoughts, before and after death, and so those who waste this life and leave in despair tend to become desparate when they pass over.   The idea that you could do this peacefully to indulge in your own personal dimension strikes me as both selfish and missing the point of life on earth.  We are meant to learn of love, love of ourselves, others and God.  No one said it would be easy.  In fact, in the earth "school of hard knocks," there is beauty mixed with horror.  Some of this is meant to let us rid ourselves, I believe of egocentric thinking.  The lesson?  Everything changes; all is in flux.  Things we assign permanence to other than love, such as parents and other loved ones, eventually pass away.  When we focus in on our life, on the good parts of our relationships, on our unity, when we live in the everpresent now, when we learn to accept what life presents, then we can graduate from the earth plane.

It is important to understand the interconnectedness of people, karma, and consequences.  You doubtless have people who know you, love and care for you.  A suicide sets of a chain reaction of grief, hindsight, and awful emotions.  If you were the cause of this grief, (i.e. the one who committed suicide), your effect on loved ones would act as an emotional or love debt that your spirit would find it difficult to leave unpaid. 

You would not be punished by some external foreign judge or jury.  In spirit, you can see from different perspectives, and when you feel your effect on others, you usually judge yourself.

We always have an ability to learn, grow, love and be loved.  To voluntarily give up these abilities on earth, believing that we would then create our own more peaceful place, is to miss opportunity, and act out of fear.  As many will tell you on this board, conquering fear is another reason we are all here.

All this being said after a natural death (not a suicide), I would not be surprised if many choose to stay in spirit longer and grow slowly there rather than diving right back into the earth school so soon.  These choices appear more open to those who have not squandered their earthly lives or taken the easy way out.

Best to you,

DocM (Matthew)

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to the contrary, i would say the idea that humans are forced beyond their will to continue living or suffer punishment would be an incredibly selfish thing for God or whoever to impose upon us.  that's the same as slavery.  if we can choose to incarnate, and in fact choose not to incarnate (as souls sometimes change their mind about incarnating in a particular body), why can't we cut our reincarnations short?

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i think that would depend on the person who committed suicide.  that's true about the chain reaction of grief.  but what about the previous chain reaction of grief already thrust upon the suicidal person??  that's not his or her fault.  sometimes bad things just happen to people and they have no way to get out of it. 

i've heard stories of people on the other side after suicide feeling regret, but also stories of some not feeling regret, only the peace of the afterlife.

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again i think that depends on the free will of the soul.  maybe a certain soul has no interest in facing the terrifying monster of fear, or has faced it enough and doesn't want to face any more.  why should they be forced to? 

to say we have free will of when and how to choose our reincarnations, but once we are living them we're slaves, seems silly and superstitious to me.  in a sense every single person who has ever lived has committed suicide, because we know we're going to die before we choose to live.  death is just a part of life. 

in fact i think the "if you commit suicide, terrible things will happen" belief is "selfish" itself, because it stems from the fact that people just don't want their loved ones to die.  kind of like "misery loves company" - "i'm struggling on this earth so you should be, too, and i'll be really mad if you decide to move on without me."

of course some people commit suicide selfishly, but often it's just because a person is tired of suffering, not because they want their loved ones to suffer.  if you want to assign blame, why not blame God?  if he's so powerful he could take away someone's suffering and keep them from suicide, right?  if God views suicide so negatively, he should do something about it!!

I guess how we look at these things depends on a lot.

It seems to me that we have to distinguish between what's in effect an egotistical position based on what comes from our every day conscious discursive intellect, and the deeper 'soul' or higher reasons why we might be here.

The former tends to be highly variable, and based on how the 'self' we've built responds to what it perceives of the circumstances its confronted with - and these responses are usually highly conditioned.

Meaning that we are usually pre-disposed to see situations as negative or positive - we struggle to achieve any sort of reasonable accuracy of judgement or equanimity. Yet looking back on what's happened we often wonder how in heck we got so exercised about what turned out to be a mirage - it wasn't all that bad, or it didn't make us particularly happy.

When we do get significantly exercised about something we pour all of our focus into it - with the result that our ability to perceive the wider situation closes down. Hence the apparent illogicality of many depressive outlooks, for example.

Lots of suicides probably wonder why they did it when they get to a point where they have a clearer, less conditioned and much wider overview of what their situation was.

At the soul level what's happening in our lives is arguably (certainly?) what we need, and that includes the ego driven stuff and its painful consequences which presumably too is a part of the creation of the experience we need.

Why need? Because it's only through trancendence of our circumstances that we can get back to God, achieve realisation, transcend this reality or whatever.

I don't think suicide is about blame, or about rights and wrongs. But what it does risk is as a result of a transient or simply wrong headed sense that 'it's all crap' wasting the many years of life which were needed to create the present circumstance.

Bear in mind too that the afterlife is fairly clearly a part of this same reality - it's not an escape. Death simply sets us up to come around around again, but next time for reasons of karma or whatever our circumstances may not be quite so fortunate. We may for example find ourselves in an existence so fraught that there's no opportunity to work the spiritual path, one where instaed we just accumulate more negative karma.

I do think that because of this it (at the practical level) very much behoves us to hang in there at all costs, to make very strenuous efforts to extract every last drop of usefulness from this life that we have been given.

Traditions like Buddhism teach a path by which it's possible to transcend the negatives, achieve equanimity and access the joyfulness that in fact is equally inherently a part of life.    Look at it this way - even if you don't make it you'll at least have burned off lots of negative karma......

Hello Seeker.

You said:
"to the contrary, i would say the idea that humans are forced beyond their will to continue living or suffer punishment would be an incredibly selfish thing for God or whoever to impose upon us.  that's the same as slavery.  if we can choose to incarnate, and in fact choose not to incarnate (as souls sometimes change their mind about incarnating in a particular body), why can't we cut our reincarnations short? "

My point was, that God does not impose punishment on us for a suicide - it appears that we impose it on ourselves, on becoming aware of our true natures, and the harm the suicide has inflicted on others.  With a situation of suicide, afterall, there are no "do overs," other than reincarnation (if it exists).  

I should point out that someone with terminal cancer, chronic agonizing pain, and the like will be very different than an able bodied person who committs suicide as an attempt to make life easier for themselves or more peaceful.  On earth, the law of attraction applies. Yes, bad things happen to good people, but most deep thought and belief manifests into our reality on earth.  It is with a deep understanding of the inter-connectedness of our current karma and situation that we can then continue on and create our own future realities.  Why does tragedy occur?  There are random tragedies, random energies and then, there are energies attracted by something we put forth (known or unknown to our conscious minds).  This is what must be examined in the desperate person.  

There is always a unique opportunity to improve one's outlook, thoughts and situation, except in the most gravest of circumstances.  I am an optimist, yes, but there is truth here as well.  To choose suicide over the path of self-understanding and applied intent, is, in some ways a squandered opportunity.  

It is likely that free will is maintained, and that one who chose suicide will be able to continue on in the spirit world.  However, there may be some key personality issues that needed to be addressed/faced (ego based), that will crop up gain for that person.


Matthew

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Interesting and hard-hitting point. One reason people need to be absolutely desperately miserable to commit suicide is that most of the available methods seem painful or not certain (could leave you just ill or disabled) or messy and distressing for those finding your body etc. If there was a simple and accessible way to do it more probably would, as you say..

I haven;t worked out yet if your last comment is wise and meaningful or not    I agree that much of what we often think we need to be happy is perhaps not true and we could be happier if we could acept things as they are more, or with modest goals. But as for your claim that getting most of what we think  we want would be unpleasant, I'm not sure!

Hamlet concludes that suicide is not a path in Shakespeare's famous passage: 

=============================================================
To be,  or not to be ... that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take up arms against a sea of troubles - and by opposing them end them?
To die... To sleep... no more...
And by a sleep to say we end the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to..
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished!   

To die...   To sleep...
To sleep?  Perchance to dream!
Ay there's the rub!  For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause...

There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressors wrong, the proud man's contumely?
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay?
The insolence of office,
And the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make - with a bare bodkin?

Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death, 
The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns,
Puzzles the will, and makes us bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others we known not of?

Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
==========================================================================

Conscience doth make cowards of us all - means that the risk of oblivion, the fear of something after life, the unknown of what dreams may come in the "undiscovered country" of death will give us pause.

Shakespeare does not take the New Age viewpoint that there is an afterlife of peace awaiting us.  He is fairly neutral in this passage on knowing the answers, but implies that the unanswered questions are what keep us going.  I would add that it is our spiritual quest for personal evolutionof the soul that is behind our instinct to refuse suicidal urges - not just the unknown that William S. so eloquently wrote of...


Doc

this is a response to everyone in this thread...

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it's an escape from earthly things, though.  our body and brain alone account for a lot of misery, not to mention the myriad countless troubles being on earth and living with other humans brings.  it's become a cliche that "death is not an escape," but it really is  i think, if you want to stop reincarnating.  because unless you're forced to reincarnate, then you could just chill in heavenly happiness and say "so what if i couldn't handle earth?  i don't have to go back there and work through the same problems again." 

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i think suicide would be a lot more common then.  that's just a guess on my part.  researchers do know that in countries like the US where guns are readily available, suicide by gun rates go way up.  so it stands to reason the easier, more painless and convenient the suicide method, perhaps the more suicides will occur, to a point.

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fair enough.  but there are around 7 billion people on earth now, meaning that there are 7 billion different responses we would have in judging ourselves.  maybe 1 person would feel extremely guilty over a suicide, and another person wouldn't feel guilty at all, instead saying "it was my only choice." 

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there's some validity in that... many rich and famous people have killed themselves with drugs.  i highly doubt being rich would make my life worse, but some people would be happier poor or not famous. 

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there's a story in, i think journey of souls where a woman doesn't try hard enough to save herself when caught in a snowstorm and she says she should have tried harder not to die (it was essentially a suicide).  but other than regret, no she did not go to hell or anything like that. 

as i said in another thread, i think "suicide" is a misunderstood term, as you could say that everyone who eats junk food is committing suicide, or everyone who drives too fast, or smokes cigarettes, or watches TV instead of exercising, or doesn't go to regular doctor's visits....

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but that's what makes life so hard, isn't it?  every tragedy feels like it will last forever.  no angels swoop down and solve our problems for us.  why doesn't God show up and save whoever is about to commit suicide?  but God doesn't save people from rape or murder or torture, either.  i wish i knew why.