Suicide Hobbles Our Spiritual Growth

                                                            *Saumitra Mohan 

       There has been a worrisome rise in the number of people living with depression in recent times. The latest WHO estimates peg it at 18% between 2005 and 2015. According to WHO studies, a person commits suicide every 40 seconds somewhere in the world. While most countries with high suicide rates are poor, there are also a surprising few, highly developed and rich nations which rank very high in this sad statistics.

         People of all backgrounds and age groups, howsoever educated and successful, have found one or the other reason to commit suicide. The reasons range from social, psychological, economic, religious, political, professional, personal to familial. Psychologists and Psychiatrists have worked hard to explain this phenomenon which pushes an individual to end one’s life prematurely. However, away from the mundane reasons as justifications for suicides, the spiritualists, metaphysicists and existentialists have strongly warned against a resort to the mental aberration called ‘suicide’.

          Recently, Mukesh Pandey, a young IAS officer and District Magistrate of Buxar, committed suicide on railway tracks. Having known the reason proffered for his own suicide through a video released by him, one was definitely not very happy because of his garbled and convoluted understanding of life. Mukesh cited family feud between his wife and parents as the instant reason for the extreme step taken by him.

        Against all the reasons advanced as justifications for suicide, the truth is no reason could ever be the right reason for an act like suicide. It is true that all of us are always beset with sundry troubles and difficulties but that definitely does not mean that we should unnaturally end our lives. The truth remains that most of us have harboured or often harbour suicidal thoughts at one or other point of our life because of multiple factors, but have not embraced it the way some people do including Mukesh.

         As they say, if life is pulling you back, it simply means that it is going to launch you into bigger things. All the good things in life have come through pains, sorrows, trials and tribulations. After all, there can be no oil if olives are not squeezed, no wine if grapes are not pressed and no perfume if flowers are not crushed. All our pains and pressures are nothing but God’s way of bringing out the best in us. But instead of appreciating the same, ending one’s life is an egregiously wrong way to approach it.

        Every difficult person, situation or pain that we experience in life is nothing but God’s way of testing and preparing us for bigger and better things in life. It’s all up to us whether we wish to pass or fail Almighty’s tests. Ergo, “If it’s not happening our way, it’s happening God’s way and He always knows better than us”. If we have felt any pain in life today, we should be sure of better things to come without allowing despondency and negativity to get within us to goad us to suicide. All the waters can’t sink a ship unless it gets inside it.

         Many of us unwittingly give or take humongous stress in life and this happens when we are too much attached to the outcomes than the process. Anything and everything that we see around ourselves is nothing but ‘Maya’, a big lie because of its transient and ephemeral nature. It is we who have created diverse assets, valorised them, and have since been running after them throughout our lives, without realising the idiocy of the same. Rousseau identified the ‘destructive influence of civilisation on human beings’ in his ‘Discourses on the Arts and Sciences’. But instead of seeing through God’s plan, we take our circumstances, our lives or ourselves too seriously and end up messing our and others’ lives without fathoming the true purpose for which we come to this world.

           Suicide is nothing but an ‘escapist’ approach to life’s problems as Mukesh himself identified. Religiously speaking, life’s problems are nothing, but part of a larger divine plan to help our spiritual progression. We often forget that we live in a mortal, imperfect world and we are all here because we, too, are imperfect. If we want to live amongst perfect, infallible people, we should go the other world. However, there is no guarantee of the same because there is no authentic proof to corroborate the existence of the ‘Other World’. Even if it is true, we may face worse souls there because not necessarily we would end up in chaemirical ‘Heaven’.

          Suicide motivated by dark passions, evil intentions, ignorance and emotional delusions is misuse of the autonomy and opportunity bestowed by God on human beings to perform their duties and work towards their liberation. Therefore, it is an evil act and a very bad ‘Karma’. The human birth entails certain duties and obligations towards oneself, others and Gods. When a person commits suicide, such duties remain unattended. This is a gross negligence of obligatory duties, which, in several religions, is considered bad ‘Karma’ having consequences not only for the individuals responsible, but also for those who may be impacted by such actions.

          According to some religions, if a person commits suicide, he neither goes to the hell nor the heaven, but remains trapped in the earth consciousness as a ‘bad spirit’ and wanders aimlessly until s/he completes her/his expected span of life upon earth. Thereafter, s/he goes to hell and suffers more severely. In the end, s/he returns to the earth again to complete her/his previous karma and start from there once again. Suicide puts an individuals’ spiritual clock in reverse.

         Most of the time, it’s not the problem but our approach, attitude and reaction which make us different and stronger souls than others. As per Spiritual Science Research Foundation, we are cursed to keep visiting this temporal world until we learn our lessons and become perfect to finally unite with the ‘Supreme Being’. So, by ending life through suicide or by dying with unresolved emotions and unfulfilled worldly tasks and desires, we only spoil our ‘Karma’ and multiply our ‘Give and Take’ account thereby further complicating and delaying our final deliverance or ‘Nirvana’ from the ‘Cycle of Birth and Death’.

         Accordingly, life’s struggles are nothing but celestial ordeals/tests we are supposed to face and pass to move to higher level tests to finally break away from the ‘Cycle of Birth and Death’ otherwise we shall have to keep coming back to pass the test we have tried to escape through suicide or other escapist measures like renunciation. So, Mukesh shall have to reincarnate to undergo his unresolved emotions, unfulfilled responsibilities and unexperienced relations with the same set of people he has tried to escape. His tests and trials may be tougher this time.

          How we face and approach life’s troubles and difficulties depend on the level of the evolution of our souls. Most of the people, who conduct erroneously or hurt others to get around life, do so because of their attenuated spiritual evolution and poor comprehension of divine design. As these difficult people and situations are God’s ways to test our spiritual strength, we should tackle them calmly with an eye to pass our tests to move to a higher spiritual plane.

          So, we should not only try to pass the multiple tests (depending on our level of spiritual evolution and past Karma) successfully, we should also help our fellow human beings to pass them with us, as that further uplifts our souls and helps in our eventual ‘Nirvana’. There shall always be unreciprocated ‘goodwill’ and ‘good deeds’, but those are due to variations of spiritual attainments. By conducting wrongly with wrong people, we only stoop to their level. However, a delicate balancing is warranted to do justice to the assigned duties of one’s station without compromising ethical and spiritual requisites.