Where Do Suicidal Thoughts Come From?

“Consciousness is not body dependent. Bodies, on the other hand, are consciousness dependent. If you remove the consciousness from a body, that body drops. But if you kill the body or allow the body naturally to decline into death, consciousness continues.”

Thom Knoles

Episode Summary

Get ready for a fresh perspective on suicide and suicidal thoughts. 

In response to a question from a listener, Thom gives us a lot to contemplate in this episode, including redefining how we think about suicide, introducing the concept of “long suicide,” and reminding us that body death doesn’t mean consciousness death or bring an end to suffering.

He talks about the role Vedic Meditation can have in easing the suffering at the source of suicidal thoughts, and also affirms that you are worthy of, and must seek, professional help if suicidal thoughts have become a regular part of your thinking or if it’s something you feel inclined to act on.

Even if you aren’t contemplating suicide, this is wisdom we should all take on board, for the inevitable occasion when we might be able to influence someone considering a premature end to their life.

If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts or are experiencing a mental health crisis:

In the United States: Dial the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention hotline at 988 or go to SuicidePreventionLifeline.org

In Australia: Dial 13 11 14 or go to https://www.lifeline.org.au/

In all other countries, visit this page for your local prevention hotline: https://blog.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines/

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Episode Highlights

01.

Where Do Suicidal Thoughts Come From?

(00:45)

02.

A – Seeking Help: A Necessary Step for Mental Health

(02:06)

03.

Break the Stigma

(04:08)

04.

What Happens to Consciousness After Death

(05:45)

05.

Nihilism, Atheism, and Suicide

(07:35)

06.

Natural Curiosity of Body Death

(09:44)

07.

Suicide is Not Self-Destruction

(11:25)

08.

Guru Deva – the Supreme Authority in the Vedic Worldview

(13:35)

09.

Guru Deva Bestows Epithets

(15:57)

10.

Guru Deva Dropped his Body

(18:06)

11.

Did Guru Deva Commit Suicide?

(20:18)

12.

Why Guru Deva Dropped his Body

(22:23)

13.

Cosmic Intelligence and the End of a Physical Body

(24:29)

14

Witness of All Intellects

(26:21)

15.

Suicide: An Act of Desperation or Cosmic Intelligence?

(28:36)

16.

Zero Effectiveness of Warnings and Campaigns

(30:32)

17.

This is Not Suicide

(33:04)

18.

We Don’t Call It Suicide

(35:05)

19.

What You Can Do?

(36:46)

20.

How Vedic Meditation Can Help

(38:56)

21.

Consciousness Beyond Physical Death: Insights from a Near-Death Experience

(41:00)

22.

Live Your Life Without Suffering

(43:03)

Jai Guru Deva

Transcript

Where Do Suicidal Thoughts Come From?

[00:45] Where Do Suicidal Thoughts Come From?

Hi, Thom, Jai Guru Deva.

I have been experiencing suicidal thoughts for a little over a year, and I have a wonderful therapist, a wonderful psychiatrist, and I have no desire to end my life and no plan to, yet these thoughts come up.

And I noticed they come up with larger, more painful emotions like sadness, frustration, hopelessness, but they also come up randomly when I’m feeling fine.

 And I try not to read into them too much, and I try not to fight them because I know I can’t really push away thoughts or fight them. But they just bubble up and are quite persistent sometimes. And so, I was curious if the Vedic Worldview had any sort of insight on this.

And I’ve heard you speak about how all thoughts come from the source, which is bliss. And so I’m curious how these seemingly dark thoughts can come from this place of bliss. And if you have any other insight on this matter, thank you.

[02:06] A – Seeking Help: A Necessary Step for Mental Health

Thank you for your question. So beautifully put and so well-spoken. I congratulate you on having acquired help in the form of a psychiatrist and therapist.

And anyone who’s listening to this who has suicidal thoughts mustn’t postpone the process of seeking some help. And for people who don’t know what to do, in almost every country, there is a helpline for people who are having suicidal thoughts. And it’s a very wise move if you’re having such thoughts, always to call a helpline and to have a professional talk to you, or someone who is a volunteer to talk to you.

The main reason for this, as we need to really investigate and look into your question properly, is that having suicidal thoughts happens in 100% of the population. Some people are better at hiding it. Some people are better at dismissing it. Some people are better at trying to think of something else. Varying people have varying degrees of frequency of suicidal thoughts.

Suicidal thoughts are considered to be dangerous when we are having the thoughts with such great regularity that we’re actually making plans and, perhaps setting times and making plans and thinking, “I’ll go through with it at this time,” and so on and so forth.

And so, as I said, safety first. If you’ve had suicidal thoughts and you’ve recognized that, and if they’re a frequent thing, then please do what my questioner did and find yourself a therapist or a psychiatrist to whom you can talk. There’s never any shame in that.

[04:08] Break the Stigma

As a teacher of Vedic Meditation, it’s very important for me to go on record as saying that Vedic Meditation on its own is not going to make suicidal thoughts go away. And depression, particularly the kind of suicidal depression, is a very serious condition which can be treated very effectively, even through simple talk therapy.

So let’s not ever put a stigma on this thing that it’s a strange, or unique, or freaky thing that we’ve had a suicidal thought. Let’s always make sure that we get some help.

And now, having said all that, the safety first things, I want to talk about the act of suicide and to contemplate the meanings of it and all of the stigma associated with it.

First of all, what a natural thought to have. After all, we know one thing, and that is, the death toll of human bodies on this Earth so far is 100%. Absolutely, everyone who’s listening to this is going to end up with a body that’s dying, and what could be more natural than to contemplate the endpoint of a life lived and what that endpoint might be like?

What might it be like when it’s your time to let your body go, and there is nothing but mystery about it for us?

[05:45] What Happens to Consciousness After Death

Because although there are many who have read much, I’m one of those, and many who have spoken a lot to many other people, the fact is we cannot yield any information, any powerful evidence-based information about what it’s like to be dead. Even though there are a thousand philosophies and a thousand religious views that love to hold forth on, this is what it’s like to be dead. Everything from atheism, which would like us to believe that at the moment of body death, there’s just complete cessation, blackout, and we can’t even call it blackout because blackout is an experience. There’s just complete cessation of experience, non-experience.

Something kind of unimaginable to us, because every night we lie down, we go into the non-experience state of sleep. We might have a few dreams in the night. We might have some cognitions. We might wake up and roll over and think about things and whatnot. But for the most part, we black out in the night. But we always wake up, and there’s a new day.

And yet, if we are to take the atheist point of view, consciousness utterly is a product of the brain. And when the brain stops, all consciousness stops as well. And so consciousness being only, merely, a brain function, consciousness can’t possibly survive brain death.

[07:35] Nihilism, Atheism, and Suicide

And so then, this is the most nihilistic of all the views, that experience simply stops when the body dies. It’s a very interesting thing that people who are nihilists, who are atheists, who have this view, that all experience stops the moment the brain dies, the moment the body dies, and the brain with it, are the least likely people to commit suicide.

It’s a very interesting fact that people who commit suicide, generally, are people who have an idea that there is something better possible if the body was simply to die. Maybe they’re experiencing a lot of physiological pain. Maybe they’re experiencing psychological pain. Maybe they’re experiencing hopelessness. 

Maybe they’re experiencing anything, but the thought about, “Well, maybe when my body dies. I’ll be in a different place, or a different experience, or a different layer. Or I’ll be experiencing someplace else, a different consciousness state. And it’ll be better than this.”

And then, natural human curiosity, “What if I made that body death thing happen a little quicker? What if, rather than waiting for my body simply to die of whatever the causes are that cause it to die..?” And there are so many: electrocution in the bath, murder by spouse, falling off of the edge of a building. So those are all unintentional and accidental things.

And then disease states, the three big Cs, Cancer, Cardiovascular, Crashes. All of the different causes of mortality that we hear about that are carrying away hundreds of thousands of people every single day.

[09:44] Natural Curiosity of Body Death

Every single day hundreds of thousands of people die. Not as many as are being born every day. The death rate versus the birth rate is powerfully in favor of a larger number of babies being born than there are people dying. And this is why the world population has only just very recently swollen to eight billion.

Eight thousand million people are populating the Earth today and it’s projected to continue on upward, beyond 10 billion within the next two decades. So there’s a lot more getting born than there is dying.

And then back to our question, “Since all these bodies are dying, including my own,” one might think, “what would happen if I just gave it a little nudge, made it happen a bit faster, because maybe I’m in pain, maybe I’m feeling hopeless, maybe I’m curious about what goes on after the body’s gone?” Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe and all these different reasons and things.

And what this causes is, it’s a natural thought to be had by 100% of the population. Just as 100% of the population is in the process right now of body death. I call it body death because I’m not one of those people who considers it reasonable that consciousness cannot survive the brain dying or the body dying.

[11:25] Suicide is Not Self-Destruction

I’m one of those people who can say, with great confidence, that consciousness survives body death. 100% of the population, right now, everyone who’s listening, is in the process accelerating toward body death. And so then, for us not to have a thought about, “What would happen if I sped it up?” would be a completely unnatural state.

So it’s perfectly natural. Just as all thoughts, and you pointed this out, my dear questioner, all thoughts bubble up from the one indivisible, whole bliss field, the Unified Field of consciousness. Likewise, thoughts about what if, also bubble up from that one indivisible whole consciousness field. All thoughts come from the same place.

And so, let’s be very clear about it. Suicide is not, in fact, self-destruction. Because the self is the one indivisible, whole consciousness field, and it can’t conceive of itself not existing. It can’t conceive of itself not existing.

Our individual consciousness, our individual mind, is a wave on an ocean, an oceanic mind. Our individual mind has gone to a lot of trouble to make arrangements to have a body in which to reside.

Our individual mind has gone to a tremendous amount of complicated detail to make arrangements to incarnate into a particular physical body and to be born under a canopy of stars and planets that are very specific to what our mission is, what our purpose is, here in the active world of daily life and living.

[13:35] Guru Deva – the Supreme Authority in the Vedic Worldview

But consciousness is not body dependent. Bodies, on the other hand, are consciousness dependent. If you remove the consciousness from a body, that body drops. But if you kill the body or allow the body naturally to decline into death, consciousness continues.

I told a story once upon a time in front of a group of people in Sydney, Australia, about my teacher’s teacher, Guru Deva. My teacher was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. His teacher was Swami Brahmananda Saraswati.

Swami Brahmananda Saraswati is known as Guru Deva. Guru means a teacher, a remover of darkness, literally. And Deva means a shining one, someone who is a shining divine remover of darkness, Guru Deva. Guru Deva is the short name used to describe Swami Brahmananda Saraswati. And in India, every great Master’s Master is referred to by the same title, Guru Deva.

So, five different people in India might say Guru Deva meaning five different Masters. So our particular Guru Deva is Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, and he lived into his mid-eighties, the last 13 years of which he spent training some 200 plus devotees who became the recipients of his knowledge base. A handful of those were nominated to be his successors.

He held a position known as Shankaracharya, which roughly translates as King of the Yogis. The preeminent, undisputed Master of all the Masters, the supreme authority in the Vedic Worldview, Guru Deva.

[15:57] Guru Deva Bestows Epithets

When in his mid-eighties, having taught for 13 years and having nominated successors already, he was sitting in the city of Calcutta, having visited there from the Himalayas, which was his regular abode. On the 20th of May, 1953, sitting in front of his 240 some disciples, he began giving each one of his disciples a little epithet.

“You are a great Master of Karma Mimamsa,” one of the six systems of Indian philosophy. “And you are a Master of the yoga philosophy of Patanjali. And you are a Master of Vedanta, as taught by Vyasa.”

“And you are a Master of Atharva Veda,” one of the four Vedas. “And you’re a Master of Yajur Veda,” the Veda to do with yagyas, and particular sacrifices and performances, and so on.

Going through the room like this, enumerating each of his students, and saying a little nice thing about each one of them, he turned to my Master Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who in those days was known as Bal Brahmachari Mahesh. He wasn’t yet called Maharishi.

And smiled at him and said, “And you speak English.” And everyone laughed because Maharishi was known as the only member of that group who spoke English.

And who also,whenever Guru Deva received letters in the mail, would receive dictation and type responses to the letters many times in English because it was still the time, it was just shortly after the time of India’s independence from England, and there was still a lot of correspondence going on between high-ranking British officials and someone who is akin to being the Pope of India, the Shankaracharya.

[18:06] Guru Deva Dropped his Body

“And you speak English,” he said. Little laughter went through the room.

Then one of the students looked at Guru Deva and said, “Master, why are you telling us this?”

In response to which, Guru Deva tightened up the existing lotus position in which he was sitting, where he had his right foot on his left thigh and his left foot on his right thigh, and tightening up his position, looked around the room one last time, smilingly, and then fell over on his face, and that was him dropping his body.

So I told the tale, of course many were astonished, and that’s so amazing that he could just make a decision to leave his body like that, to drop the body and leave it without any great ceremony or drama or anything.

In India, when we refer to a Master dying, we don’t say die, because die or death means cessation, and there is no cessation; consciousness continues.

In the Vedic worldview, when one has gained enlightenment, one’s individuality during one’s body life has merged with its Cosmic counterpart. The individual intellect has merged with Cosmic intellect. The individual emotions, feelings, have merged with Cosmic feeling. This is during lifetime in the body, the individual mind has merged with Cosmic mind.

What is in that body of someone who’s enlightened is the Cosmos having a human experience. The Universe having a human experience is the description that someone who is enlightened would describe themselves as “I am the Universe having a human experience.”

[20:18] Did Guru Deva Commit Suicide?

Although humility, typically, will prevent someone from saying such a bald-faced thing, nonetheless, this is the value of what’s being experienced.

At the end of telling this tale and all of its implications and answering a few questions about it, the members of my audience, gradually one by one, peeled away and went off to their homes and families and whatever, and one woman stayed behind, and she was looking very downcast and crestfallen.

And she approached me, and she said, “I never knew that Guru Deva committed suicide.”

And I said, “What? I, I don’t get it. What do you, what is it you’re saying?”

She said, “I’m so sad to hear that the great Master of all the Masters, by your own description, committed suicide.”

I said, “I don’t really follow you.”

She said, “You told us that he consciously decided to drop his body and leave it behind, that’s suicide. So Guru Deva committed suicide.”

And I have to say, I was thunderstruck by her assessment because though I had heard that story for decades and many times from my own teacher, it had never occurred to me that it could be described as “suicide,” that a great enlightened Master had decided to drop his body.

And the reason is that it’s not an individual making the decision. As I’ve just finished saying, an enlightened mind is a mind that finds itself merged with Cosmic mind.

[22:23] Why Guru Deva Dropped his Body

And so, who made the decision about dropping which body? Cosmic Intelligence made a decision to drop one of its billions of bodies. In this case, the body that we all refer to as Guru Deva. Cosmic Intelligence made the decision.

Now we’re coming up against the real conceptualization of what it is about suicide that makes us suspicious of it as a dignified way to drop the body. If we consider someone like Guru Deva to be one with the Cosmos, and yet nonetheless made a decision on a given day, May 20th, 1953, sometime late in the afternoon, that it was time for that body to drop.

And I remember asking Maharishi, my teacher, “Why did he decide to leave at such a young age, mid-eighties? That’s not very old for a Yogi.” These great Masters often live to be a hundred and more.

Maharishi said, “He’d already finished teaching us everything that he intended to teach us. And his presence was becoming a distraction because we kept on asking him questions, the same questions over and over and over again, and his answers were the ever-repeating known.

“And all of us knew the answers, but we kept asking him questions because we loved being around him. We loved finding that Unified Field value in him, and in order to make us self-sufficient and to cause us to have to go and teach in his name, to cause us to find what he really was, that universal Unified Field consciousness, to find that in ourselves, he had to remove the individuality.”

[24:29] Cosmic Intelligence and the End of a Physical Body

“Oh,” I said. “Couldn’t he have just, he was a forest Yogi. He had spent 50 years prior to coming out as a teacher. He had spent living in the forests, living in the jungles, living in lonely places, all on his own. Couldn’t he have just returned to the jungle?”

Maharishi said to me, “We were all forest yogis. We would simply have followed him. And so if he tried to disappear, we would’ve known everywhere he could have gone and would’ve just, there’ve been hundreds of people following him.

He had to remove the localization. For that localized value no longer to be found at that address was the only possibility. And it was time because he’d already spent 13 years training us, and it was more than sufficient.”

I thought, well, that puts a new light on it. For Cosmic Intelligence to decide to drop one of its bodies. What is it when an ocean, one drop evaporates out of an ocean? What does it matter to the ocean? It’s one of its drops.

We have to remember, this is not an individual sitting inside of a body deciding to bring that body to an end. This is Cosmic Intelligence sitting inside of a body, deciding to bring that one specific body to an end while simultaneously being aware, I am Totality.

Totality consciousness is the consciousness that lies at the baseline of all individualities, therefore, of all bodies.

[26:21] Witness of All Intellects

In one of the lines of the ceremony that we perform when we first teach someone Vedic Meditation, there’s a ceremony of gratitude that’s performed to the Masters of the Tradition.

And one of the lines zrefers to Guru Deva as, “The witness of all intellects,” and that doesn’t mean that there’s an individual who’s witnessing everyone’s intellect. It’s referring to his true status.

Universal consciousness, naturally, is the Unified Field of consciousness, which is at the baseline of all intellects. This is what it means, witness of all intellects. Not an individual snooping on people. Not an individual eavesdropping on people’s petty thoughts.

Cosmic Intelligence, knowing itself to be Cosmic Intelligence, being able to witness all of the thoughts that it’s producing in each physiology that it owns, which is all of them.

And so then, who is it, and what is it that decides to bring a physiology to an end?

In each of our cases, everyone who’s listening, the body will end. I’m telling you, it will. One of the strangest things on Earth is the fact that although everyone is hurtling in the direction of body death, we all behave as if we’re immortal. Very strange, wondrous, wondrous. And yet clearly, all of these bodies are dying.

What kind of stigma do we put on someone who makes a decision to speed this up and make it happen a little faster, for any number of reasons? If it’s a Guru Deva who is dropping the body, this is big Nature’s consciousness deciding its body should die. And this is like Nature doing its thing, but it’s doing its thing in a very pointed and intentional fashion.

[28:36] Suicide: An Act of Desperation or Cosmic Intelligence?

And then we take someone else who is feeling that life is hopeless, and this is not my questioner because she already emphasized how none of these negative thoughts append her occasional thought of suicide.

But in the case of someone who is feeling life is hopeless, or one just doesn’t have the energy, the dynamism, the wherewithal to keep on progressing, one doesn’t see the point. One doesn’t possess the capability of looking at all of the possibilities of life and seeing something there that’s worth living for.

And one is finding the emotional pain, the psychological pain, perhaps the physiological pain, the physical pain, to be just too much to bear, and they make a decision and end their physiology.

When we contrast the two, a person who’s living in bliss consciousness, Cosmic awareness, a vast unboundedness whose individuality had long, long ago merged with that Cosmic force that we call Nature itself, and Nature then makes a decision to end its body, versus someone who just can’t see a realm of possibility beyond the relief that might come if the body were simply to disappear. One of these is an act of desperation, and another is an act of Cosmic Intelligence.

[30:32] Zero Effectiveness of Warnings and Campaigns

We’ve given a tremendous amount of negative stigma to people ending their bodies. You look at a packet of cigarettes sitting for sale. If you’re living in Australia, it’s not just warning you what kinds of diseases you’ll get if you open this packet and smoke it.

In Australia, as all of you know who live there, there’s actually photographs of what your lungs will look like, what your throat will look like, what your face will look like when your lower jaw has to be amputated, and so on and so forth.

These are the things pictured here, which are going to happen to you if you spend X number of dollars, open up this packet, light a match on the end of this little stick and smoke it. Here’s the picture of what’s going to happen to you. It’s supposed to be a deterrent. Evidently, it doesn’t deter anybody.

And surveys that have been done in Australia on the effectiveness of the “Don’t do it, don’t do it” campaign. The effectiveness is about zero.

People who love smoking absolutely ignore the warnings about imminent death will come as soon as you partake of this product. And yet we see people smoking everywhere, out in the streets, and cigarette sales are soaring, particularly during times of stress and uncertainty.

Someone smokes cigarettes, they end up with terrible emphysema that progresses into lung cancer, that progresses into the inability to breathe at all, and then death. Do we say they committed suicide? Generally not. We just say, they smoked.

Somebody who drives a car too fast, regularly drives a car too fast and perhaps under the influence of some kind of intoxicant, and then they end up coming into contact with a telephone pole or another car or going over a cliff or something.

Do we say they committed suicide? Not really. We say they always drove in a risky fashion and ended up dying.

[33:04] This is Not Suicide

We see people who engage in all kinds of behaviors that endanger their cardiovascular system, making themselves candidates for cerebrovascular accidents, strokes. Making themselves candidates for heart attacks. We see people engage in all kinds of imbibing of every kind of carcinogens besides cigarettes, that almost guarantee that they’re going to have an early demise.

And although they seem semi-consciously to be making arrangements for their body death, do we say they committed suicide? No, we don’t, really. We don’t say they committed suicide.

And so “long suicide” is not referred to as suicide. And even very long suicide, we know that when people have regular, very depressive thoughts and they don’t do anything about them, when people have regular negative emotions, and they don’t do anything. Doing something, the word for that is the word therapy.

Therapy means doing something. That’s what the word actually literally means. Without engaging in therapy, there is nothing but a long-term certainty of an early death, early body death. Do we call it suicide? Generally, not.

What point is it that I’m making here? A vast majority of human beings living on this Earth are behaving every day in ways that are going to end up giving them an earlier demise than what would happen if they lived a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle, and yet we don’t refer to it as suicide.

[35:05] We Don’t Call It Suicide

What do we refer to as suicide? Someone who pointedly, and rather quickly and unexpectedly, makes a successful plan to bring their body to an end. Then we say suicide.

And so, suicide and suicidal ideation, it’s a fancy way of saying having suicide thoughts, is far more common than people realize, and behaving in ways that will guarantee a short-lived body, also extremely common.

In perhaps more than 95% of the population, if I had to make an estimate, are doing things semi-knowingly, which are going to end up shortening their body life.

Whether it’s leading a sedentary lifestyle, not exercising at all, or eating damaging foods, or non-foods, or smoking cigarettes, or drinking alcohol, or engaging in drug-abusive behaviors.

You name it, there’s so many different ways. Driving cars too fast, and so on and so forth. And yet we don’t call any of it suicide. Having suicidal thoughts, 100% of the population. We don’t call it suicide when the body dies.

And so we have to start being very careful about the critique that is implicit in our use of this word suicide.

[36:46] What You Can Do?

Somebody does something. One of the problems with suicide is that when someone commits what is unambiguously suicide, bringing an end to their body very quickly and successfully, is that it tends to leave everyone who’s left behind with the thought, “What could I have done to have stopped them from doing it? There must have been something. There must be something which, if I had spotted it, if I’d known they were going that way.”

And the fact is, when someone makes a strong decision that they’re going to bring their body to an end, there is nothing that anybody else can do really to stop it because someone who is resolved to do such a thing.

Even 40% of people who are released with a bill of relatively good health from a 24-hour suicide psychiatric watch, where they’ve been watched for 24 hours a day for a number of days, because they were considered a high suicide risk. 40% of those people, as soon as they can get out of sight of everyone who’s monitoring them, manage successfully to commit suicide.

What is it you can do? The only one thing we can do is, us, ourselves to start experiencing the full potential of life.

What can we do to not foreshorten our life? First of all, we have to practice Vedic Meditation twice every day. Practicing Vedic Meditation twice every day releases the stresses that drag at us.

The stresses that give us the constant thought of low self-worth. The stresses that give us the constant thought of, its all futile and doom and gloom and defeatism. The stresses that cause the thoughts. All thoughts bubble up from that Unified Field value but filtered through the polluting effect of stress.

[38:56] How Vedic Meditation Can Help

These are the stresses that cause the thoughts of defeatism, of doom and gloom, not seeing possibilities, behaving in ways that are damaging to our physiology, shortening our life, making us feel as though there’s no possibilities, there’s no hope. Even if you get happiness, the happiness is going to go away again.

A feeling of futility and all of those things that might cause us, even to some degree successfully, to cook up a plan to make our body come to an end more quickly. The idea behind all of that being, “Somehow I’ll escape from all this.”

If we practice Vedic Meditation twice a day, we release the stresses that cause the negative defeatism kinds of thoughts, and which might lead to self-destructive thoughts and even tendencies.

But we need to know that when such thoughts come, we can deal with them intellectually by this one way of thinking. There’s no actual escape.

The idea that somehow you’re going to escape from bound consciousness states, you’re going to escape from an idea of there being no possibilities, you’re going to escape from a low consciousness state, simply by killing the body is a mistaken concept.

What happens when the body dies? Whatever state of consciousness we were in, we continue to be in that state of consciousness until we regain our next body or gain our next body, we reincarnate, and then we pick up fresh from where we left off, and then have to expand our awareness and make our movement toward Cosmic Consciousness in the new body.

[41:00] Consciousness Beyond Physical Death: Insights from a Near-Death Experience

The idea that, “I’m going to kill my body and then things will be better,” it just doesn’t turn out to be correct. As regards the atheistic concept that, I’ll kill my body and there’ll be nothing, and I’d rather have nothing,” implying that there maybe I’ll experience this nothing thing and it’ll be better than all of these thoughts, “but I’d rather have nothing than to have all these thoughts.”

Consciousness survives body death. This is the lesson we’ve learned from hundreds of thousands of annals of the experiences of people who’ve had near-death experiences.

In a near-death experience, for it to qualify as such, the body has to have died and been medically pronounced dead by a qualified medical practitioner, and then the person revives, comes back, as it were, into consciousness, and describes what happened after their body died.

And it turns out that, in the largest percentage, higher than 90% of people whose bodies have been pronounced dead and who are interviewed, or have an opportunity to express what it was that they experienced, we find that they described a lot of experience prior to coming back into their body and experiencing daily life again.

And so the idea that, “I’ll just die, my body will die and then there won’t be any experience at all, which is preferable to continuing to experience all this hopelessness, and defeatism, and things, and pain,” perhaps, is not an idea that’s supported by the evidence. The evidence points to, you will continue experiencing.

[43:03] Live Your Life Without Suffering

And so we have to do something to gain some bliss traction. That bliss traction is gained through regular experience of Vedic Meditation, 20 minutes twice every day, taking a deep dive systematically, strategically.

Experiencing oneness with that underlying field of vibrant life, creative intelligence, energy, stamina, capability, robustness, that deep inner source inside of us.

And then, if we are having continued bothersome ideation about suicide. If we’re one of the 100% who have such thoughts, but you’re having them a little more frequently than what suits you, then do get some help from a qualified professional. Don’t rely purely on Vedic Meditation to sort everything out.

I highly admire anyone who, as a result of practicing Vedic Meditation, becomes sensible enough to actually seek help and get therapy because all of us need to have that kind of communality. It’s built into our DNA. We are tribal people.

This is the way we are from ages immemorial, and we require communality. We seek, it’s natural for us to seek wise and trusted counsel.

So for our own self-sufficiency, practicing Vedic Meditation twice every day, and increasing our knowledge about all of the theoretical underpinnings and implications of such a practice. Listening to my podcast, joining my Mentor Circle, coming away on retreats.

And then, if we are having bothersome levels of self-destructive ideas, get some therapy, do that. And then listen again to some of the points of this particular episode of my podcast and see to what extent this might help you.

It’s not necessary for us to suffer in life. Life is capable of being lived in a state of 24-hour happiness, 24-hour bliss. If such a possibility exists, the one most urgent thing, the highest priority, is to awaken that state of consciousness and to live it, in daily life.

Jai Guru Deva.

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