Steve, just to say that I appreciate so much of what you posted today. So balanced and at peace with the human condition. I think that is what I treasure most in your posts.
My SO died of a heart attack the day after our last 2 phone calls. In that last phone call he reported having gone for a walk and experiencing chest and arm pain. I suggested that he, just to be safe, go to an emergency room. But he didn't and the next day he died, age 46, with no family history of heart disease. Sometimes I still feel guilty that I wasn't convincing enough to get him to go to the ER. Because he was interested in the bardo and between live, etc., I've read a bit about that. One thing the *experts *say is that souls basically are given a choice whether to have an easy life or a life focused on learning lessons and growing. That might be true. I don't know for sure. But I'm pretty sure that no one can fathom all that's involved in any one soul's path of evolution. Or even just the choices of one lifetime! On Sunday, May 25, 2014 9:52 AM, "steve.sun...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> wrote: A nice rap. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : Really. This issue really IS not related to TM or any other belief system in my mind, because I've been on the survivor side of suicide a couple of times and gotten to experience the emotional and karmic ripples that emanate from it. I know that there are some here who are opposed to suicide for religious reasons. They may claim not to be, but whether they call it the "wrath of God" awaiting the suicidee or the terrible karmic consequences awaiting him, the bottom line is that they can been conditioned to believe that it's WRONG. And that Bad Shit will happen in the afterlife to those who do this WRONG thing. I'm not drawn that way, and never have been. I think that in some situations, suicide can be a viable and graceful option available to those who have few others. Terminal illnesses in which their "last few days" can be reliably be predicted to be 24/7 pain is one such situation. The country I currently live in believes similarly, and offers physician-assisted suicide as an option to the terminally ill. At the same time, they *don't* offer it to someone who is feeling down because he never had any luck with women and was still a virgin at 22. The doctors who run the assisted-suicide centers are skilled at detecting such people, and referring them to a similarly-paid-for-by-their-affordable-health-insurance psychiatrist or social worker. If this option had been present in Isla Vista (original home of MIU) recently, several more people would still be alive today. I find it interesting that this suicide talk comes up just after a digression dealing with people's preferred methods of going out. Parsing them, I found that beheading scored high on some people's Kick The Bucket List. Others preferred being "put to sleep," as their pets are. For me, the best method of checking oneself out I've ever heard came from a friend I met in the Rama trip. He had worked as a biologist, and thus with a poison called tetrodotoxin. It comes from the Japanese fugu fish, and is a powerful nerve toxin. We kinda know its subjective effects because the Japanese actually consider fugu fish a delicacy, and eat it. This all goes well if the delicacy is prepared properly by a master sushi chef. If it's a lesser chef, sometimes the gourmets die, right there in the restaurant. It happens more often than you might imagine...the Japanese are an odd people. Occasionally, however, someone gets a big mouthful of tetrodotoxin and survives. So they can tell us what almost dying from it was like. What it does is shut down sensations from the bodily functions while leaving the mind completely alert. This appealed to my Rama-group friend, because he was a big believer in the Tibetan idea of being as conscious as, possible when diving into the Bardo. For people who believe this, being either so doped up with painkillers that you can't think clearly or "being put to sleep" is not a good option because your mind is either not clear or not even functioning. So my friend actually *saved* a vial of tetrodotoxin for his own use, should he ever feel the need to check himself out in the future. He has since died, and in one of the most painful manners possible, of pancreatic cancer. I was not in touch with him when he was sick, and only heard about his death after the fact, but it really wouldn't surprise me if he checked out by imbibing from his long-saved vial of tetrodotoxin. And if he did, I have no problems with this. It was his choice, and if he made it, bully for him. In other cases, suicide is not such a clear-cut thing. It leaves karmic ripples that can harm others. I know that my brother's kids are still fucked up by the fact that their father took his own life. I know that I'm still a little fucked up by not discovering how serious his problems were and how many of them were tied to alcohol until discovering after his death -- hidden in closets and under his bed -- dozens of empty half-gallon vodka bottles. That's a real "How did we not see this?" moment. I wish I had not lived halfway across the country and had been able to be more proactive in trying to get him some treatment. In Rama's case, I think his actions fucked up a lot of people, too. Yes, it was his choice to check himself out if he was really dying already, and wanted to avoid dying slowly in some ghastly hospital (as he claimed, and as many of his former students still believe). But he really WASN'T dying. I saw his autopsy report. There was nothing systemically wrong with him, OTHER THAN the symptoms he chose to interpret as "I'm dying." As it turns out, almost all of those symptoms are caused by long-term Valium addiction. But I don't have any fantasies about being able to talk him out of it if I had still been around at that point. He was as classic an example of Narcissistic Personality Disorder as has ever existed, and if he *believed* that he was dying, well then he *was* dying. No one would ever have been able to dissuade him of this belief. Add to that the wacked-out chemicals running through his brain while trying to macho his way through cold turkey to get off of the very drug that had caused his symptoms, and *of course* he wound up taking one last moonlight swim and a bunch of pills and becoming crab food. Yeah, I wish that both these guys had made another choice, but I know enough about both of them to realize that it just wasn't in the cards. My brother was yer classic Southern Guy, and the very concept of "talking to someone about his problems" would never have occurred to him. It was easier to die. Literally. With Rama, WHO could he have talked to? He had spent most of his life building up the image of himself as enlightened spiritual teacher, and we all know the myths that people project upon that. What was he supposed to do...open up to one of his students or a shrink and get some help? SO couldn't have happened. But I sure wish it could have. In both of these cases, PEER PRESSURE is what really killed these people, not the gun or the pills. Both of them were part of communities in which it was SIMPLY NOT ACCEPTABLE to have "mental problems." The overriding community myth was "People like us just don't HAVE such problems. And if we do, we hide them." That belief KILLS, just as effectively in communities of affluent Southern Yuppies as it does in communities of meditators.
