Suicide

[Andrew]

Thankyou Mac. How does one access the PM facility?
William.

Hi William! Welcome to Afterlife Forums! The PM system is a little difficult to find for newbies - it's sort of hidden. Once you are logged in, go up to the top right corner of the website, and then click "Notifications". From there, a box will pop up - click "Inbox". That will take you to the private messaging system. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask me!

[vic smyth]

Good evening all. Since my dear wife, who had been suffering from a bi polar disorder for the past 5 years, took her own life almost 10 weeks ago, i have visited several afterlife websites in the hope of gaining some insight as to what may become of her spirit, if in fact the afterlife is a reality. At first I was an open minded sceptic, but due to the gut wrenching feeling of loss of the most important person in my life, i was desperate to 'believe' . However, due to the conflicting opinions that I seem to get with each website on the spiritual fate of those poor suffering mentally ill souls who could see no other option but to end it all, I am becoming increasingly more sceptical at the so called evidence of an afterlife.
Just skimming through the 6 pages of this thread, it would appear that none of the posters have lost a mentally ill loved one to suicide, and to say that they will be condemed to have to return to live again to relearn some obscure life lesson sounds insensitive,cruel, and quite ridiculous to be frank. And Roberta, you think dying is fun?
Try telling that to someone choking to death, with the excruciating pain from the full weight of their body crushing their spinal cord via a pencil thin length of Telecom rope.And try convincing that persons shattered spouse, upon discovering his soulmates broken and still quivering body how much fun dying is.
Perhaps you should have titled your book 'The Fun of Being Dead' so as to avoid offending the memories of thousands of mentally ill suicide victims and their surviving loved ones.
William.

Hi William,

Thank-you so much for sharing your story. I'm sorry for what you are going through. I know that many of the messages on this forum can be somewhat contradictory. Sometimes a response to a young person who is suicidal will differ from a response to someone who lost a spouse. One thing that I can say for sure is that the members on this forum will bend over backwards to be of help to you. So please keep coming to the forum to read and post. We'll do our best to help you through the grieving process. And please consider professional grief counseling if you haven't already done so.

My heart goes out to you.

With Lovingkindness (metta),
vic

[mokandi]

I'm so very sorry William.

[william61]

Thank you again Mac, Andrew, Vic and Mokanda for your condolences and support. It would be quite accurate to admit that I am no less emotionally distressed now than I was on that tragic day 10 weeks ago when my wife ended her life. That was the 4th time in 5 years that she tried to end it all, and each time it was I that found her and was lucky enough to be able to revive her.Tragically I found her too late this last time. She had received regular psychiatric counselling for the past 20 months, and after a bit of trial and error. a suitable medication and dosage strength was settled upon that gave her a positive, happy disposition without making her feel lethargic or put on excessive weight. She became a much loved and enthusiastic member of her mutual support group. As her carer, i accompanied her on twice weekly activities with the group. Her bubbly personality always lifted the spirits of the other members of the group and counsellers alike. Her suicide came as a terribly unexpected shock, not only to me but also to her psychiatrist,case managers, support group counsellers and members who all attended her funeral.
The only reason i can think of that could explain what went so suddenly wrong was that for the last 4 weeks of her life, Nga my wife who was 49 years old, was going into Menopause. The Menstrual bleeding lasted the whole month, and she was scheduled to have a medical procedure the day after she died. Apparently Menopause can have a distressing psychological effect on even some mentally healthy women. In Nga's case,we think it altered the chemical balance in her brain, that the medication wasn't formulated to correct, which sadly proved fatal.
Whilst all that is now just sad history, and nothing will bring her back to me, I am desperate to believe that this beautiful,sensitive and caring persons spirit lives on in the afterlife.
William.

[Fasaga]

William

Please let me add my condolences as well, and respectfully congratulate you for your strength and persistence and commitment to your wife over such an extended period of difficulty and grief.

Your acceptance and belief in an afterlife will strengthen as time goes by untill you are together again.

[Roberta Grimes]

Good evening all. Since my dear wife, who had been suffering from a bi polar disorder for the past 5 years, took her own life almost 10 weeks ago, i have visited several afterlife websites in the hope of gaining some insight as to what may become of her spirit, if in fact the afterlife is a reality. At first I was an open minded sceptic, but due to the gut wrenching feeling of loss of the most important person in my life, i was desperate to 'believe' . However, due to the conflicting opinions that I seem to get with each website on the spiritual fate of those poor suffering mentally ill souls who could see no other option but to end it all, I am becoming increasingly more sceptical at the so called evidence of an afterlife.
Just skimming through the 6 pages of this thread, it would appear that none of the posters have lost a mentally ill loved one to suicide, and to say that they will be condemed to have to return to live again to relearn some obscure life lesson sounds insensitive,cruel, and quite ridiculous to be frank. And Roberta, you think dying is fun?
Try telling that to someone choking to death, with the excruciating pain from the full weight of their body crushing their spinal cord via a pencil thin length of Telecom rope.And try convincing that persons shattered spouse, upon discovering his soulmates broken and still quivering body how much fun dying is.
Perhaps you should have titled your book 'The Fun of Being Dead' so as to avoid offending the memories of thousands of mentally ill suicide victims and their surviving loved ones.
William.

Welcome, dear friend! I am sorry for your loss, and please understand that in bereavement, ten weeks is no time at all. Please cut yourself some slack, dear William - give yourself the time and the space to grieve. Most widows and widowers say that they never really "recover" or "move on," but with time the pain lessens and in its place is a new relationship with the graduated spouse that is in its own way fulfilling and complete. You will see her again, dear friend, and meanwhile she is healthy and happy and free of the illness that once tormented her.

Thank you for your title suggestion! Actually, I had intended to entitle my book "Dying For Dummies," but fortunately I was overruled ;-). No, you're right: no matter what the cause of death might be, the process of rendering a body unusable so it will allow the mind (or soul) to separate is not fun. You may be relieved to know, however, that many of the dead who have communicated with us tell us that those who are dying in violent or uncomfortable ways are out of their bodies before the trauma happens, so even though the body seems to suffer, the mind does not. I hope that fact comforts you! The evidence tells us, too, that in a situation like your wife's - mental illness, a terminal illness, or some other such handicap - the mind seldom feels guilty about having committed suicide. So your beautiful wife is fine and free and likely trying right now to communicate with you.

Dear William, I think it is very important that you learn as much about death as you can. Until you know a lot more, you will continue to feel incensed about things like reincarnation and the title of my book, and you will become increasingly skeptical that something like survival of death is even possible. You appear to be skimming the surface, dear friend, grazing here and there on random websites, and using the superficiality and implausibility and seeming inconsistency of those bits that you pick up just to fuel your skepticism and your anger. You are not helping yourself! We have nearly 200 years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence which is fully supported by quantum physics concepts and consciousness research, so the truths that you are going to learn will be sound. But this is a big story, and in order to grasp it you are going to have to do a bit of work! I urge you strongly to set aside the next six months for concentrated studies in this field, not on random websites but rather in the original afterlife evidence that is available to us all. Your friends here are happy to help you with questions and suggestions as you do your research, and I promise you that if you do it sincerely every question that you have will be answered. You may find the study guides available for free at http://funofdying.com to be an easy way to begin. Just try not to look at the title of the website - not just yet ;-).

Give yourself the gift of understanding, dear William. Your beloved wife has guided you here, and now she will guide you in your quest for the truth.

[william61]

Thank you Fasaga for your kind message of support, and thankyou Roberta for your welcome and your considerate reply.
My apologies for being a bit snappy over your books title. It is obvious to me now that you meant that the fun begins after the physical body has died. Although i fully read the first three pages of this thread,once I realised that none of the posters had been a survivor of a close loved ones suicide, I just skimmed through the last 3 pages before writing my post.
Before coming here I have spent many hours on the ' Spiritual Development/Evidence of the Afterlife' website reading and learning as much as I can absorb about dying and the extensive scientific evidence of the Paranormal. I think I've read everything Victor Zammit has written on the subject, and followed many of the other links on that site. Most of the beliefs of the various Spiritualists are fairly consistant and the evidence reasonably convincing,although it doesn't matter how many credible sounding stories and anecdotes one reads about,unless one personally experiences 'contact',and I haven't as yet, then a degree of scepticism is still difficult to shake off. What does as you put it, fuel my scepticism and anger, is that not all Spiritualists are singing from the same song sheet when discussing the subject of Suicide. Some believe the victims are received with love, compassion and understanding, whilst others believe that the victims are forced to witness the distress and misery that their ''selfish'' act has brought upon their surviving loved ones, and then condemned to reincarnate in order to be re educated. Where do these opposite beliefs come from? Surely the spirit world doesn't give out bad information? My wifes psychiatrist may be mistaken, but he believes that no one could commit suicide unless they were at least temporarily insane. If that is correct then that would rule out ''selfishness'', so all suicides would be victims and therefore should be received into the afterlife with love, compassion, etc, etc.
Sincerest regards. Bill.

PS, It is comforting to learn once again that the spirit may leave the physical body just prior to fatal trauma. I have also researched that suicide by hanging is a method commonly chosen because contrary to how gruesome it appears, if done correctly is in fact one of the quickest and least traumatic ways to go. Can any of your spirit contacts confirm if that is true?

[Roberta Grimes]

Dear Bill, we are so glad that you are here! You are an intelligent and open-minded skeptic, rather than a prickly and closed-minded one, so to my mind your skepticism is reasonable - and even admirable. Most of us here were also skeptics initially, as were many of the most productive afterlife researchers. When you set out to do research but doubt that you will find anything positive, it makes that much more profound an impact when you personally find the truth!

The confusion that you feel about Spiritualist beliefs is understandable, and I will tell you here where each of these beliefs comes from. The problem is that Spiritualism, even though it is more open-minded than most, is still a belief-system, which means that it establishes dogmas. Stay away from belief-systems in doing your research! And that certainly includes modern mainstream science, which has adopted atheism as a fundamental dogma and thereby turned itself into just one more belief-system. You don't want to only believe, dear friend. You want to know! And that means that you have got to go back to original source materials and the results of basic scientific research, and draw your own conclusions free of all dogmas.

The differing beliefs about suicide that you have encountered in Spiritualism made me smile as you recount them above. Every one of them is based in the findings of sound afterlife research, but then unfortunately transformed into dogmas! Let us look at their different bases, free now of all dogmas:

1) Love, compassion and understanding. Every one of us, no matter what we have done here, will graduate into an environment of the most perfect love, compassion and understanding that you can imagine - no, even much better than you can imagine! So this is the basic environment that greets every new suicide. Infinite love and help is there for each of them.

2) Forced to witness the distress and misery that their "selfish" act has brought upon their surviving loved ones. Soon after each of us graduates, no matter what our cause of death might have been, we will go through a life-review. We will experience again every event of our lives, reliving the feelings and emotions of each of them, and - more importantly - we will now ourselves feel everything that we caused others to feel! So - yes, indeed - those who kill themselves will have this awful experience. But they will have it in an atmosphere of perfect love, and without the slightest hint of judgment from others. They will be asked to forgive everyone who ever harmed them in life, and the evidence indicates that part is easy. What is hard is that they also will be asked to forgive themselves for everything they ever did in life. This is the hard part! And it is the primary reason why we so strongly warn people not even to consider suicide. If we cannot forgive ourselves following our life-review, we will find that our spiritual vibratory rate will start to slow. And if we find self-forgiveness to be impossible, even despite abundant counseling and help, we risk condemning ourselves to the lowest post-death vibratory level. The awful "outer darkness" that Jesus warns us about.

3) Condemned to reincarnate in order to be re educated. In decades if reading communications received from the dead over the past nearly 200 years, I have seen just a couple of situations where someone was apparently "strongly urged" to enter another lifetime. The evidence is that it almost never happens. Instead, those who have made some big mistake (like suicide) will often be so annoyed with themselves that they will choose to enter another lifetime fairly quickly, and often with the lessons made even less pleasant. It isn't forced on them, in other words, but rather they will often insist upon it.

So you see, dear friend, the Spiritualists you have encountered are right in the essentials. Where they go wrong is in turning any of this into dogmas and beliefs, rather than accepting each aspect of what all the evidence tells us as true, and trying to better understand how it fits with the whole gloriously complex greater reality. After death, our lives are so love-filled and our personal autonomy is so broad and complete that no dogma (other than love and forgiveness) ever could apply. That is why we are so insistent here on banning specific religious discussions! Arguing about dogmas and beliefs is like arguing about how many angels can dance together on the head of a pin ;-).

[mac]

Oh, Roberta, I can't let what you're claiming about Spiritualists go unchallenged. As you're not a Spiritualist, and I am, I must claim to understand a little more about our religion and philosophy than you.

Spiritualism isn't a belief system - if you believe it is then you've been researching the wrong stuff. Spiritualism provides evidence of what it maintains to be true. Evidence in abundance if it's researched properly and teachers/guides who help expand on that knowledge. It's a mistake to claim that all is known about any subject - suicide included - no matter what the source. Claim what you will we don't have beliefs and/or dogma, at least not on this side of the big pond.

In terms of the ending of one's own life, Silver Birch - one of the greatest teachers to influence Spiritualistic understanding of the afterlife - has guidance to offer. What I hear from yourself - and I'm sorry to say this - are things I can not accept as coming from highly spiritually-elevated sources. But I know there's no point in our debating these points of contention and will just say that what you understand about Spiritualism is maybe what you've found from North American sources. It's certainly not what I've learned from our respected sources in the UK.

Our new member will take from this disagreement whatever he will but for me it's important to redress the imbalance concerning my own persuasion.

[Roberta Grimes]

I stand corrected as to Spiritualism, dear Mac!

But my two points to our friend Bill remain:

1) If Bill heard differing things from different people who all claimed to be Spiritualists, and hearing their apparently inconsistent views confused or distressed him or made him more skeptical, then it is important for him to understand where all those different beliefs were based in different aspects of what is one consistent body of afterlife evidence. Spiritualism is not at fault here, but rather I would fault those who would take what they have learned in Spiritualism and used it to form personal dogmas which they then shared as facts about Spiritualist beliefs.

2) Beliefs-based systems in general - including the conclusions of modern mainstream science, to the extent that they are based in atheism as a fundamental dogma - simply cannot be trusted as sources of truth. It is possible through extensive research to arrive at an understanding of reality which is based in evidence and not based in anybody's preconceived notions, and only when we get to that point can we vanquish what is otherwise a healthy skepticism!