What is the difference between someone who commits suicide and someone who is a spiritual seeker? What is the difference between the pain of stripping away all we know, and the pain of ending one’s life?
What is it to die by one’s own hand? What is the last moment feeling of trapped in a dead end, of hopelessness, the vision of dark night stretching out as an endless road to nowhere?
Where are you now, my love? Lost in a canyon of your own making. Tumbling in a body-less space. No up or down. No time. Only dimensionless darkness and a howl with no end.
And those of us who are left, are left to ask: Why must good people die? Be drawn by forces they don’t understand, run from places they fear to tread? Is there courage there? To plunge into the unknown, to let go. Or is it the desire to escape, to flee, to be done with the misery?
The world is an illusion, everything is perfect – so says the highest wisdom – cold comfort when a friend lies dead.
Issa said:
This dewdrop world
Is but a dewdrop world
And yet—
The task before us is to live. To discover what it means to truly live. This may feel like death, may feel impossible. To let go of every pre-conception, every hope, every dream. To be naked before the unknown. This may feel like suicide.
But it’s not.
The search is a yearning for wholeness, not for oblivion. The search is a solution, not a procrastination.
Suicide is not a solution. Whatever dogged you keeps on. The hounds of hell rather than heaven.