Suicide

I realise that recent realisation may have relevance to suicide.

The essence of suicide is the need to destroy oneself. It is like murder where the existence of a person, for whatever reason, makes our own life unbearable except that person is our self.

Okay in murder the reason may be greed, someone has what we want and so we steal it. But whichever way that person gets in our way to such an extent that we can't bear to have them alive.

Admission that I do not understand suicide at all. But the idea of killing oneself, or someone else, depends upon a strong belief that people exist in some definite way, and we need to take action to stop them existing so definitely.

Suppose instead of destroying them we were able to change them into someone else. Would this achieve the same purpose as suicide or murder? Well the simple fact is that people change all the time, even our own self is different every day, every moment.

The problem is that we have this idea that people are fixed, that we are fixed. We get stuck with our self or someone else and we think this means they need to be destroyed.

So this is fundamental to close observation of the world. Literally nothing is what we think it is under close observation. If we ever find something to be how we think it is, its just because we have got into a habit of looking at it the same way. We may think our highstreet is boring. We have walked it every day for decades what else is there to know. But guaranteed we have walked it the same way most of this time and so of course it looks the same. Next time we walk the high street, turn a few random corners and take a different way and guaranteed it will look different. Same with ourself, or anyone else. No one is what we think they are, least of all our self. And we are all changing all the time so we can't even catch up with our self. We literally cannot know something in its entirety. Even if there was something fixed there, like a statue, it is so complicated and changing we could never know it. Which is the same as saying there is nothing fixed there.

And so we get to the suicider who can't bear to have themselves in their life or the world any more. But stop. Right now this "person" who we think is our self is already completely different from whatever we are thinking! We don't even know this person who we wish to destroy. And guaranteed whatever we think of this person based on the past or whatever evidence is just a shallow copy of the real self, that is beyond knowing anyway. This is the essence of freedom. Right now we are actually completely reborn if we are willing to look again. That can be hard, it takes lots of meditation practice not to trip back into habitual ways of walking our "high street".

This links with the "lotus" post. Whatever the past self is, it does not matter, it provides only the dirty soil for a new day today. All our actions are built upon the past, but they are not the past. Okay for the smoker an addiction to smoking means the soil is perhaps not a fertile as someone who never gained the habit. But looked at another way the person who never had a smoking habit will never have the "test" of giving up and all that this teaches us.

I in fact justified taking up smoking because a friend said they could not give up and I was fascinated to see what this was like. In the end as explained before in the blog I gave up by fasting on Mondays. A Hindu I was working with used to fast on Thursdays, and I thought if he can quit food for a day, how much easier to quit cigarettes for a day. So they became my fast. It was hard at times especially when I was having a bad day, but I always knew I could look forward to smoking on Tuesday (even of that meant staying up till midnight to get a cigarette). I never broke that fast even today if I ever have a causal cigarette. What was interesting is that come Tuesday I started to delay the cigarette, knowing that I could have one, but feeling good about extending the fast. By the time I started to add a fast on Thursdays I was ready to give up all together! I had learned the joy of not smoking and knew all the tricks my brain and body played to get me to smoke. Now while my "soil" was bad, the growth of the lotus was actually good because it taught me a lot about how brains and bodies work!

In this sense of being new at ever moment, Christianity makes perfect sense. Jesus says believe in me and you are forgiven; you have new life through the grace of God. In Colossians 3:5-10 Paul says:

5 Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. 6 Because of these, the wrath of God is coming.[b] 7 You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. 8 But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. 9 Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.

Paul even uses the analogy of "you use to walk in these ways." Repentance is the same process as walking the old high street but in a new and different way. We have "taken off [y]our old self." We break habitual ways of thinking about our selves and force ourselves to walk new ways that may lead to regret or guilt for the old ways. In fact much of the clinging to the "old self" and the "old ways" is resistance to admitting we are wrong. A silly example of this is when I moved in with a friend. He used to cycle to campus a long way, and one day I found a real short cut along a path between houses that halved the distance! He was a bit embarrassed that he did not find it and had been cycling such a long way for so long. Now it might be tempting just to keep doing what you always did to avoid admitting you looked stupid. But while you might take a victory from ignoring the new way and preserving you old self, it is shallow victory cos deep down you know the better way now. Taking off your old self, and walking in the ways of the better self feels right, but means admitting the old self looks foolish, but it can be very hard to admit this. This is exactly "attachment to self" and it is what holds us in the Past rather than realising the Present Self, reborn this very moment, with all its freedom and possibility.  

So if analysed correctly suicide actually stems from the same problem as Death itself. Belief in a fixed self, and not accepting that "I" is actually always in change, faster than we can ever catch up with. Realising this we can let go of this incredibly strong attachment of holding onto a "Fixed Self." Once this has gone, what is there to die? We never "became" anything in the first place, so what is there to lose, or even kill?

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So the key "evidence" for "self" is that we have memories. I can remember the day I really understood counting. This is something that no one else remembers and the person who is subject of that memory is "myself." I was sitting in a car being driven home from school by my Mum and it clicked. Only I have that mother, only a few people went to that school etc etc. It was definitely "me." And not only can I verify with evidence within the memory that it was me, it is the same "me" that is remembering it.

But this is slightly sloppy thinking. We are actually checking the consistency of a memory by comparing with other memories. I remember who my mother is, which school I went to etc. So what I doing is just checking memory consistency. Memories come as a nexus or interrelated information. what we then need to do is check memories with provable facts. If I have a memory of living in Kansas then it is false, because I can verify I never did. If I find out that my mother died when I was very young then this number memory does not make sense. It was not my mother driving me home.

So there is work we can do with memories looking for consistency. But how do we test "who" was having that memory?

Well we often have friends saying do you remember when we did this and you can't remember. So that is a memory you should have of yourself but don't. Conversely you might remember something that you can prove never happened and was perhaps just a dream or something you read and falsely remembered as yourself. "Who" is that in a false memory? Is that you? "Who" is it in dream? "Who" is the main character in The Hobbit? We say Bilbo Baggins. But we can check that Hobbits do not really exist and its a false memory or story. So "who" is actually a bit fuzzy even when it is working properly.

But the real point is that I am having the memory so it is me who was there and recorded it. Its like finding a photo we took and deducing we must have been there.

So it is true we have lots of memories that have been collected just like photos. But who is in those memories?

We its obviously NOT our self! We were the one who was there, but we are not there anymore!! The rememberer is never the subject of the memory because the subject of the memory is the one memorising. We don't remember while its happening, only afterwards.

So we have a contradiction here. We are proving it is us in the memory because we are the one doing the remembering, when the one doing the remembering is obviously not the one who was there: we are no longer there!

So its like travel. I was in France many years ago and now I am here. I can prove I was in France because I have a stamp in my passport.

Now a few ways to go around this but the key point is that we have been in many places in our life, but there is something unique about where we are right now. Its not good enough to say I am at home when we are ACTUALLY AT HOME. The true self is the one alive right now. Not the one in memories or in the Past or the Future. I will be on the train tomorrow, but its a phantom self. The real self is here now.

So how does the real self get these memories handed to it about the Past? Well first off it its old selves that took these memories and handed to us. We are not the same person who both took the memories and now remembers: if we really were the same then why remember? Just experience again!

Being able to experience sets our True Self aside, from all the memories and imagined selves who are hollow thoughts.

Now the actual process of memories being handed down to us is interesting and I'll blog in future, but just because we receive them is no proof we are the actual same.

Suicide it seems is mostly motivated by receiving lots of stuff we don't want, stuff which pulls us into the Past or the Future and which overrides our True Self and our ability to experience things as they are. When we kill ourselves we are trying to kill the person in memories or future imagined selves. What is interesting (but quite subtle) is that in reality we can't kill our True Self. and when people speak of going to Hell they are referring to the ignorance that leads us to treat our indestructible True Self like it was a memory, or to treat a memory like it is our true self.