Let’s talk about suicide and its aftereffects from a spiritual perspective. I often get emails from people asking if they should commit suicide and wanting to know what will happen to their souls when they do. That’s a really good question.
We’re going to use the analogy of a play, as in a theatre production. When you incarnate you pick your parents and life circumstances. You are, in effect, accepting a role in a play. A lot of behind the scenes work goes into creating your role in this play. Other people may have wanted the role but you got it. Now you’re responsible for what you do with it.
So you incarnate and you’re doing your part just fine. Then one day you find that the play is getting harder and harder to perform. Maybe you’re late for a performance. Maybe you don’t like the lines you’re getting. Maybe the audience is heckling you. Maybe your role is just really tough; you’re in every scene, and you don’t feel like you have a chance to catch your breath. Maybe you’re in no scenes and you’re starting to feel ignored or like nobody cares. Maybe you don’t like your fellow actors. Maybe someone else in the play is hurting you. For whatever reason, the role you’ve got just doesn’t make you happy any longer and you want to quit.
Like in a real play, when you quit your role without notice, i.e. committing suicide, you leave a gaping hole in your wake. The role you were meant to play is no longer being filled. So the other actors have to work around your part. If there was a love scene coming up, that other actor now has no one to perform with. Scenes need to be rewritten. Lines need to be reworked. Shows may even need to be cancelled or rescheduled. And you know what? You’re responsible.
I don’t just mean you’re responsible for leaving them in this mess. You’re responsible for fixing it, even from the other side. When you commit suicide you are removing yourself from the play which intersects tens or even hundreds of lives (or more). Prearranged meetings now cannot take place. Children you were going to have now have to find other parents or life circumstances. When you prematurely drop out of the play you leave a lot of people hanging. You can give up your role, but you cannot give up the responsibility you had in that role.
So let’s switch gears for a moment and discuss what happens when you cross over after a suicide. You leave your body and one of two things happens. First, you may immediately regret what you’ve done, and you find yourself in a state of shame and/or guilt, two of the lowest levels of consciousness you can be in. In this state you’re not even capable of helping yourself let alone fixing up the lives of the people you left behind. What I’ve seen on the other side is that people in this situation tend not to cross over fully, fearing judgment for what they’ve done. In truth, there is no need to judge yourself so harshly, but if you find yourself in this state it’s really difficult not to be hard on yourself. Angels come and try to help you to cross over. They do this by helping you feel the love of Source or God. If that doesn’t get through to you, they’ll gently help you raise your energy so you can feel it. Some people are so stuck in their low vibration state, however, that it can take what amounts to years to fully cross over. See the movie, What Dreams May Come, for more on this concept which the movie covered extremely well.
Not everyone who suicides sinks down into shame and guilt. Sometimes people do get to the other side and realize that although there are consequences to their suicide they can deal with them. These people are able to maintain a fairly high state of awareness and get busy working with the guides to fill the vacancy they’ve left behind. Threads need to be rewoven into the tapestry of life. New encounters need to take place. New events in the maze of life need to be created. What happens is that you will work with the guides of the people whose lives you were meant to touch in a significant way to make sure these people are still able to learn their own lessons and live their own purposes without your presence. Once you complete this process (which could take a while depending on many factors) you are free of the karma you attracted by suiciding and are released to the “after life.”
So, you are allowed to quit. Free will ensures that you have the right to take your own life. But you must be aware of the consequences and the responsibility you have to every single person whose life you would have touched in a significant way. It’s like if you were a parent of a small child and you wanted to go out for the evening, you need to hire a babysitter to take care of that child while you’re gone. If you leave without doing that first, the child could suffer terribly and then you would be responsible for that.
I know life can seem really tough sometimes. Most of the people I know have contemplated suicide at some point in their lives. Sometimes life seems overwhelmingly hard. But you can change your life any time you want. Whatever you’ve gotten yourself into, there’s a way out that doesn’t involve quitting. You may get to the end of your life completely worn out, broken, and even devastated, but from a spiritual perspective that’s better than quitting. When you quit you still have to learn all the lessons you came here to learn, so the next time you incarnate it isn’t going to get easier, it will probably be harder.
Don’t quit the play. Ask for help. Maybe you can be sent on vacation and your understudy can perform your role for a while. Maybe you can get the writers to give you fewer lines, or more support in your scenes. But don’t quit. People are counting on you, including your higher self. God only gives you as much as you can handle, but sometimes it’s hard to remember how strong you really are. You’re allowed to ask for help. God gives you that too … when you ask for it. Accept the help when it comes.
