Suicide

[OutThisLife]

What does this community have to say about suicide?

It's a mistaken attempt to transcend human suffering. By nature, organisms want to maintain their physical integrity at all costs. When someone contemplates or commits suicide it's because they don't understand where their intense feelings and ideation are coming from, what to do about them and how to transcend human suffering in a constructive way.

But this is obvious. This isn't what you have to say. This is what everybody knows.

 

[_Avatar_]

I don't think many people truly understand "where these intense feelings and ideation are coming from, what to do about them and how to transcend human suffering in a constructive way." If these things were common knowledge, we wouldn't have so many suicides occurring all over the world.

 

[IJesusChrist]

The consumption of life IS the rule of life itself, I see this, but now that I see this, it pains me. All life is beautiful, but who am I to judge that I am more beneficial to the overall scheme of the universe by continueing my existance, thusly destroying other's?

Man he took the words out of my mouth!

 

[OutThisLife]

I don't think many people truly understand "where these intense feelings and ideation are coming from, what to do about them and how to transcend human suffering in a constructive way." If these things were common knowledge, we wouldn't have so many suicides occurring all over the world.

Those people hardly matter.

 

[_Avatar_]

Those people hardly matter.

To whom and/or from what perspective?

Interesting findings: Birth Trauma Linked to Adolescent Suicide, by J. Greenberg (1985)
Or this: Obstetric care and proneness of offspring to suicide as adults: case-control study (1987)
More recent research: Perinatal circumstances and risk of offspring suicide (2006)
Or from a psychedelic perspective: Birth Trauma and Its Relation to Mental Illness, Suicide and Ecstasy

 

[IJesusChrist]

oh god you sound like CM

 

[????????]

^hehe i thought so too

(CM was a member fond of Grof's books and he used to tell us about it)

 

[BrainEater]

we want CM and the others back, but without the annoying ego-games and dramas please!!! 8)

 

[trick]

we want CM and the others back, but without the annoying ego-games and dramas please!!! 8)

+1 :ANAL:

 

[Sprax]

I don’t think people should condemn suicide or those who do it. You have your life and if you do not wish to continue your story, you can choose a sooner ending.

I agree. Personally I'm curious to see what happens.

 

[IJesusChrist]

I was listening to talk show radio today, very liberal radio show, and it was talking about suicide. I had a strong urge to call in and explain my view, but I didn't.

I have class very shortly so I won't go in depth, but please, read.

Suicide is a feeling. Like all feelings it can come and go. I have waves of suicidal thoughts from the depths of my childhood on through my experiences with psilocybin. The thoughts are there because of pain. I want the pain to stop - but the pain explains it will never stop, and shows an abrupt wall for the future. I attempt psychologically to dismantle the wall, to walk around the wall, or even to see behind the wall, but I soon become trapped within a sphere of remorse and terror.

The grandest vision is the wire to the outside, the greatest perception of mine sees the wall, the sphere from the outside. Although not comforting, the vision describes the inevitability of escape. Why must I be tortured so? Because I like it. It, like most other feelings, I believe, is the byproduct of a chemical or lack there of, and with all chemicals, one can feel withdrawel.

I feel withdrawel when I am not happy or sad, and rather than wanting happiness, I question what it was like to be sad. I tempt the mistress of sorrow to get something I once remembered. Soon I am in a bubbling stew of death and panic. Why did I have to be curious? Why did I look where I knew better? I missed it.

Its odd, but it's the truth with me. The feeling of sorrow and pain brings a supreme intelligence to me, something I cannot get from happiness - atleast not yet.

But to destroy this, I do. I claim the land as uninhabitable, yet open to will - and I carry on. Cold shoulder to the desert snow, the dead pines, the vast abyss. Greet me, oh peers of life.

Lot has been on my mind this day.

 

[BrainEater]

so your addicted to your own brain-chemicals??? ahahhaha
sorry mate just kidding!! ... i wonder, why you need pain to feel real OR why you don't simply create a nicer reality for yourself... even if it is "just" the inner reality. you talk as if, your inner reality were more real already anyway, and that you don't like that, so you search search search for a "cure".
that's all good, but your mistake is that you might be seeking it from outside, when you could find it within, anytime, anyplace.

you'd be amazed of your abilities of transformation, if you stop being afraid of change, therefore resisting it... what you want to create, might not be created, while you are resisting the same thing you want to have created.

feelings are what you use to relate to the "outer world", as well as to the "inner world" of yours.


it's true: you can return to the source (god). the point is, that you can do that while still being alive, also... wouldn't you find it sad to die and right then figure out the meaning of your life and finally be able to SEE??? or would it be nicer to figure that out, while still having a body to live in in the first place... maybe you can replace the negativity you are constantly creating in your subconscious mind with positive thoughts, feelings and intentions. you might also transform them, it's up to you, remember!!


stop creating a fake identity in your head, that makes you torture yourself/others/the world... just be yourself... and be aware of who you are... if you don't know who you are, try to find out!


peace :weedman:

 

[IJesusChrist]

Brain, I have done what you said, and love it. I am a better person, I am happy when I want to be, and can change my mood within a few minutes.

That being said, I still have the attack, the panic anxiety distortion. It doesn't MATTER how intelligent you are, what you attempt with it, it is not logical, there is no way to accept, deny, cope with it. You just live it and it runs its course.

I feel intelligent though, when it comes - and I like that - I feel like I am 'above' what I was before. I don't really know if that is an illusion or not, having great insights usually brings me into that state, or I am already in that state. Insight -> Direct correlation with the great death.

I don't know. It's impossible to explain.

 

[BrainEater]

yeah that makes sense man!! glad you are feeling better!! well i guess the part of yourself you can't yet possibly be coping with, might eventually follow the rest of yourself, if the intention for change is strong enough there. i know that one single emotion, perceived in a seemingly limited and very short period of time, might not be communicated possibly in a relative time period and you might need to write many books to explain it. but well if that's what needs to be done, so shall it be.

to some extent, it depends; it is dependant on you and be sure that at least i am quite confident you will make it if you lack confidence that someone believes in you. that being said i want to encourage you to believe more in yourself, what you want to achieve and to love yourself more. don't invest too much energy in all the negative shit, like what you don't want etc, (which is basically thoughts or maybe emotions) but recognize that resistance against "whats already there" aka reality, mostly creates (more) conflict. so you will make progress and you'll know when you will have made the progress you possibly desire. just don't attach too much to the fake identity you create in your head, then you can start to loosen yourself from it and maybe disattach (from) it. love yourself tho for what you have already made even if it means hating yourself, love yourself for hating yourself, in order to turn the wheel around and go into the direction YOU want. if there's anything i can do for you tell me and i will try to do my best.

peace :weedman:

 

[IJesusChrist]

just keep making purposeful posts brain.

I am in no trouble, do not worry about me - It's all beautiful when said and done.

 

[ophiuchus]

" It doesn't MATTER how intelligent you are, what you attempt with it, it is not logical, there is no way to accept, deny, cope with it. You just live it and it runs its course."

if you look at it that way. if you look at it another, which is as simple as blinking, you will know more (and in the way of happiness, well the balancing act of happinesss and unhappiness)

 

[Sprax]

Well written Jesus. I can't add anything meaningful so I'll just say that I totally recognize the feeling. Luckily I'm past those feelings and any sense of nostalgia connected to them by many years by now.

For me the solution was drugs. I saw life from a new perspective and realized life was not as bleak as I thought. I realized that the way I saw things were just a perspective, not an objective truth. From then on I decided to make my own truth. Yes to some extent you can chose to be positive, although it takes hard work.

The danger with drugs, I think, is that some people decide they want to live in the dreamland instead of taking when they've learnt and applying it to their life.

 

[zezt]

Usually in western culture--which has forgotten its indigenous traditions with entheogens---theres a danger to use drugs, like cannabis, and even psychedelics, as a form of escape. In a way this could be understandable because the culture many of us live in is oppressive and has no place for soul----we are supposed to be machines in the mechanistic belief-system, and all that has suppsed 'meaning' is consumerism, and fame, and image. So many want out of this. So it is important to get a meta-perspective of this

I make an anology with school. As a kid I hated school--really. But the thought was that it was a given. But now I know that it is just a man-made institution children are forced to go to (Gatto).
So likewise with our situatiion as adults. Many of us believe that this miserable existince many of us have to live--working in jobs we hate, living in ugly buildings in ugly places with ugly neighbours is a given, but it ISN'T it is a man-made 'world' which we are enslaved in. To KNOW this is a way of UNDERSTANDING why serious states of depression may occur and linger, and hopefully diggin the real reasons may help us understand WHY we sometimes feel like that, as well as all personal problems as part of it

This culture--the very same--will not accept its part in breeding dis-eases, and blames us for having 'chemical imbalnce' etc and then throws drugs at it, and even the barbaric electro convulsive 'therapy'. And YET fears, and prohibits psychedelic healing, and creates all forms of negative propaganda surrounding them including dismissing the sacred experiences as 'chemical rides' etc.

So my point is to get a bigger picture of what we are in. That this situation doesn't just effect you and me but very many people who are as enslaved and worse in this system and RIGHTLY--like animals in cages--will feel low and VERY low at times. But exploring this must give a different vision about things.

 

[BrainEater]

it's not so much to wonder about, if you think about the fact that western culture in general has ascribed itself to a extheonautical worldview rather than a entheonautical... that exclusively is what makes them walkers on the path of the universal grave. they do have something to die for, but what exactly do they have to live for, that is not corrupted at its core?

 

[GregKasarik]

I feel privaliged to have been able to read the moving and enlightening things have been said in this thread. I'd like to thank all for sharing.

Over the last several years, I have devoted several trips and quite a few meditations to contemplating this topic and I'd like to share my views on the issue. Although I ended up sharing the bare bones of a very complex mystical philosophy. I hope that people will accept my appologies for mangling tenses and grammar and spelling, as I'm quite tired.

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I believe that we are eternal. We are god. Not "God" with capital letters, but rather, the most infinitely small manifestation of the Divine, which I have, for no apparent reason, begun to think of as "ChaWa". Together, we along with every other sentient imaginable make up the entity that is "God". Or rather, he makes up us. His omniscience demands it.

But the problem is that God is infinite, omniscient and omnipotent, and this also means that all things being equal, God is bored shitless. Anything that he can do, he can do with the greatest of ease. His life contains no challenges at all. It is effectively meaningless as everything he tries to do is automatically done at the "easy" setting. He has one of the most difficult extistential crisis's imaginable.

But for the eternal being, there can be no destination. Instead, the journey is all that matters. But the really cool, mind blowing thing, is that God is an eternal being that has not committed suicide! He is a representation of psychological well adjustedness at an infinite scale. This also explains why God is Good (more on this later).

So, to keep himself sane, he spends his time exploring the infinite and all of the possibilities that it entails. He divides the eternal up into smaller sections and these divisions are what we call lives. Lives of universes, lives of galaxies, lives of people, lives of dogs and lives of ants. In search of interesting stories, he lives that are the exact opposite of his majesty; mundane, powerless and challenging. Your life. My life. The life of every possible sentient imaginable.

But this is an eternal being that we are talking about, so we aren't simply talking about God living your life and moving on. Rather, we are talking about living every possible variation of your life and the lives of every person on the planet. And the lives of every possible person and sentient that exists in all of the other possible variations of our universe. And once this has been done, doing the same in every possible concievable universe in every possible dimensional configuration.

The immensity of this is staggering and experiencing it is one of the most awe inspiring encounters with the Divine that I have been blessed with. It is also quite existentially terrifying. It is terrifying to know that I will experience all the misery and hatred that the world has to offer and that I am powerless to prevent it, beyond what I can do today in this life that I lead. But equally, it is uplifting, because the beautiful outcomes are truely awe inspiring. Indeed, such has been the power of the glorious, trancendance that I have comprehended, that I have come out of trances and trips, whispering the words, "thankyou", over and over again, without even realising it. It as if my subconcious wants to express spontaneous gratitude to the overself that is God.

But the mortal mind is not equipped to deal with the Infinite, hence the division into smaller parts, in which there is a beginning and an end. So death is God's gift to you. It allows you and every other creature to reset, to recharge before going on (hopefully this insight is of use to IJC). But the infinite mind is in a very real sense not fully equipped to understand the mortal and while for most of us our lives are calibrated to be challenging, on occassion they will be too hard for us to deal with and even overwhelming in thier scope.

As such, I believe that suicide isn't evil, selfish, or wrong. Indeed, sometimes it might even be neccessary, but mostly, I believe it is pointless. Commit suicide and you will merely find yourself back in exactly the same place, as God (ie. you!) explores the variation on the infinite in which you didn't commit suicide. Maybe the next time around, you will live a long happy life. Maybe you'll instead commit suicide a few days later. Either way, you will continue to explore the infinite possibilities until they are exhasted. The pain and the joy are there and will be experienced by the Infinite Mind of the Divine.

But our lives aren't just our lives. Our lives are the lives of everyone around us. Indeed, our lives are not complete until we have lived them through the lives of everyone with whom we have interacted in our time on earth! This is possible, because we are all motes of God and the evidence for this can be found during the Near Death Experience, when a person has their past life review, in which they relive their life. But the amazing thing is that during the NDE people relive their lives from the perspective and experience of others, both human and animal. When we die, we will feel the joy and uplifting of the love we bought and the humiliation and anguish of the misery we created. Thus we experience the true extent of our lives. Thus we learn empathy and can now understand why God is good. He has experiened every evil that the world has produced and as such has learnt the value of the good in a very personal way.

But what is the purpose? Personally, I believe that God is seeking to tell stories of immense scope and stature. He alone is the force who can bind all of our realities together, and can feel all of the emotions present when sentients get together. He feels the joy of two lovers, tinged with the jelousy of the secret admirer, who knows that he can never be a part of that love. For him, our lives are a symphony of emotions, feelings and ideas that coexist harmoniously together, in a majesty that we can only vaguely comprehend. The feelings of the suicidal person add to that strange emotional harmony and I suspect that their death creates a dissonant wave, whereas thier salvation and ongoing life, difficult as it may be continues to add an additional counterpoint that would otherwise be lacking.

On another level, God is setting out to tell the stories that speak of the greatness that sentient life can achieve. Many of the stories told will be those of people such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao, but imagine the glorious outcome if that evil were instead manifest as good. If a nation instead of sending millions of its young into war and death, instead sent millions to help, teach and lift up the less fortunate than they. I believe it is these outcomes that God seeks to find and that in effect, we are all parts of the solution. There are an infinite number of glorious stories to be told, and each of us will contribute in a very definite way to those outcomes. It could be that a person's suicide means that it is so much less likely that our particular path will tell such a story.

However, the reality is that for many people, life simply is not worth living. Perhaps they have major psychological issues, or chronic pain that makes their lives unbearable, or have been diagnosed with a chronic debilitating, or even fatal disease. For these people, we should extend the right to take their own lives, while doing our best as a society to ensure that through thier own free and unmanipulated will, they refrain from doing so. Indeed, the health of our society, and can be measured by the degree of empathy for its most distressed members and I believe that a society that cares for its members will find that they refrain from needlessly killing themselves.

The reality is that many people who attempt to commit suicide report feeling desperately lonely, isolated and as if the world doesn't care about them and this is a key aspect of our existence that needs to be addressed. There is but one moral commandment: "Act with Empathy" and each suicide is not just the "failure" (although I don't like that word here as it doesn't convey the subtlety that I am after) of the person who has taken their lives. Instead it is the failure (again I don't like that word) of the entire network of people and society that should be surrounding the person and helping them in their times of need. Much of this damage would have been done during childhoods of abuse, neglect, or mistreatment, but the cost of guilt is far too often born by the children, partners and siblings, who are left to wonder "why" and deal with feelings of guilt and loss.

Enough for now, I think!!