Introduction
In the not-so-distant past, my wife abruptly decided to divorce me after 14 years’ of marriage. I was devastated, and soon afterward began experiencing extremely painful suicidal episodes. As a young child, I was brought up as a Christian with the understanding that I had only one life to live. But by the time I was suicidal, my views had changed: I now believed in reincarnation.
Within the context of reincarnation, the decision to take my own life brought up questions I didn’t have an answer for. For instance: would killing myself free me from the pain I was in, or would I continue to be in pain after death and before my next life? Would suicide affect my next life in some way? Was it possible that commiting suicide would actually increase my pain? Or perhaps maybe the pain would die with my ego, and not be carried on by my soul into the next incarnation?
Intuitively, I felt it was wishful thinking to believe that suicide could end my problems. So I decided to “ask the universe” for clarification. The response came in “fragments”: I discovered some information in books by contemporary spiritual healers, and more information in private healing sessions. Some of this information comes as a result of direct experience: in one healing session I discovered that I had committed suicide in a past life.
A person who believes in reincarnation might be tempted to think that killing oneself is not “such a big deal”. But this is not the case at all. In fact, the consequences of taking one’s life appear to be more severe than any other possible action, no matter how evil it may seem. In this article, I will briefly describe the spiritual consequences of suicide that I became aware of during my personal journey.
The Pain Intensifies
According to one source, the physical body acts as a buffer against emotional pain. Once the soul is released from the physical body at the time of death, the physical buffer no longer exists. Additionally, the emotional pain does not cease with death.
Tentatively, any emotions being felt at this time will be amplified significantly. Therefore, a person who commits suicide while in a distressed emotional state might experience a shock of emotional pain following his death.
A Sense of Failure
Life experiences that lead to suicidal experiences are not accidental. These experiences have been purposely planned for soul development. The experiences are also temporary, with the caveat that the suicidal person cannot be sure of this fact. And this is on purpose. If the person experiencing the tough situation didn’t have doubts as to whether or not the situation would improve, the necessary self-development could not occur.
When a person dies, the soul regains the knowledge that was lost when he was born. With the realization that the current life situation had only been a test, the soul can encounter an intense feeling of shame for having “failed” the test. This is one of the negative consequences that I experienced after killing myself in a previous life. In fact, the experience of shame was so intense that I literally kept myself in self-isolation in the afterlife, which could be thought of as an experience of hell.
Retaking the Lesson
When a person commits suicide, the lesson to be learned from that experience does not occur. It is therefore necessary to retake the lesson by living a future life with similar life circumstances. It appears that this is exactly what happened to me in my current life time.
In my previous lifetime, I had gotten myself into debt while trying desperately to support my family. Realizing that I would not be able to make the debt payments, and fearing I would be sent to debtor’s prison, I decided to take my own life.
In my current lifetime, my wife filed for divorce while I was between jobs, and I quickly fell into debt. Over a period of the next few months, I struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. In addition, I struggled with the shame of being unable to support my children financially.
For the record, I want to point out that life in which the lesson is repeated is not necessarily taken in the “next” lifetime (according to chronological order). Instead, I am aware of other lifetimes that occurred between this one and the one in which I took my own life.
Trapped in Purgatory
There is also the possibility that a person who commits suicide might end up in a state that seems close to the religious concept of purgatory. This information comes from a man by the name of Tom Sawyer, who had a very profound near death experience in 1978. Tom’s near death experience led to some amazing psychic and healing abilities, along with many interesting discoveries about the afterlife.
According to Tom, a person who commits suicide is “sidelined” into some sort of existence that the soul is unable to break free from by himself. In this existence, the soul is no longer able to participate in the cycle of reincarnation until some sort of help is extended by powers external to the soul. Whether or not this is something that I personally experienced is unclear. But what this means is that not only do a person’s problems stay with him after committing suicide, but a person who commits suicide does not get the chance to work out those problems (without some sort of intervention). In the meantime, the soul is potentially trapped in the state of emotional torment that he was trying to escape by committing suicide.
Lighting the World
There is another consequence of taking one’s life that I would have never considered, but in fact has serious repercussions for all of humanity. Although we don’t usually think about it, each human life – just be virtue of existing – helps to “lift up” the rest of the universe in its own unique way. While incarnated, each one of us gives off a frequency, which could also be referred to as “light”, every second that we are alive. When a person cuts his life short, the potential light that would have been given to the rest of the world during the remainder of his life is now lost.
Although this might not seem like a big deal, it apparently has much more serious consequences than can be possibly imagined. In general, humans do not seem to have any concept of just how much they affect others, and the universe in general. The significance of how much we really affect each other is only clear once a person dies and is taken through her life review process.
Conclusion
From a spiritual standpoint, no matter what actions we take in life, there are never any judgments. Our purpose on earth is to purify ourselves so that we can eventually reunite with God. And at some point in time, every last soul will return to God.
Each person is on his or her own spiritual journey. We do have free will in deciding the roads we want to take. If we don’t choose wisely, we may end up going down the same roads more than once. The more times we resist our own self-development, the more painful the process can potentially become for us.
The most destructive way that we resist self-development is via suicide. Although suicide seems like an escape, it actually adds to the pain that one is trying to escape from. The more that people become aware of this, the greater chance we have in reducing the number of people who view suicide as a viable option for finding “a way out”.