Suicide
A death wish
A story: an alcoholic blackout
The convenience of death
Kill the Buddha
Suicide
When we are trapped in a lie, but can not tell the truth – suicide is an option.
If we contemplate suicide, we have not achieved adult autonomy. We remain a terrified child fearing we’ll be killed if we tell the truth -- but we’ll die if we don’t get honest. We live at the mercy of forces bigger than we are – our parental introjects really. These unnamed tyrants lurk in our unconscious and torture us, but we dare not confront them. We are damned if we tell the truth – and dead if we don’t. We’re in a terrible bind. Maybe we should just end it all.
In suicide, the child can have his tantrum against his parents, yet never face the consequences of his honest rebellion -- parental rejection – for he no longer exists. Suicide is the distorted option for those who fear leaving the family’s system of emotional compromise, but can’t live within it either.
Like a closeted gay man with sexual and emotional interests exploding inside of him, yet unable to come out for fear he’d incur family disfavor, he finds another solution in death – quickly in suicide, or slowly in addiction, depression, or dissociation from honest feelings. Even AIDS is a tragic way out of confronting internalized contradictions.
When honest living and poisonous lying become impossible, we do have another option: we can take our lives in suicide … or we can take our lives seriously and in a new direction -- and seek help.
Telling the truth is painful and ends the illusion of parental rescue, but it will not end my life
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A death wish
As we begin to understand suicide as a way to avoid an honest interface with painful realities, we also see the “death wish” that imbues our daily living, the subtle ways we impose death on ourselves routinely to avoid the truth buried within us. Certainly our addictions are clear examples of our wish to die, but there are subtler ways that we compromise our life force so that we live in emotional destitution.
Why do we yoke ourselves to deadening jobs and fruitless relationships? Why do we find lethargy comfortable, even inevitable? Why do we see life as fated, full of empty obligation? Why do we approach God through faith in magical rescue, backed by the terror of punishment?
The source of our “death wish” is simple yet hard to face. The repression of our life-force was a child’s survival technique to appease the compromising limits of mother and father
As we leave childhood, we may remain an adult/child with allegiance unconsciously remaining with our parents’ cruel wishes to deny the truth at our core to insure continued alignment with the family and its dysfunction. This is all a vain hope of the adult/child to attain “love” and approval at last.
A battle wages within us: to live or to die? That really is the question. If we remain a slave to mother’s and father’s deadening wishes, we must die to our honest vitality. To live fully, we must kill the parental demons that live uncensored in our psyches. If we fail to wield the death blow to our internalized and damning mother and father, we must kill ourselves instead, sometimes slowly with the slow drip of addiction, obsession, and depression – or quickly in suicide.
The heaven we seek is not freedom from hell, but freedom from the vengeful voices of mother and father and the culture that bred them.
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A story: an alcoholic blackout
Ken woke up from a frightening dream. He could hear surf, but couldn’t recognize where he was? He panicked, struggling to make his bleary eyes focus. Hung-over, his head was pounding. He felt sick. The room slowed its spinning and began to arrange itself into reality. He was sleeping naked next to some guy he didn’t recognize -- a stranger. There was an empty booze bottle on the night stand and a bowl of pills. Were they recreational drugs or HIV medication? Ken couldn’t tell.
Then he remembered, “I’m on Fire Island ... I went out drinking last night.” But he had no recollection of how he got here or who this stranger was. There were signs that they had had sex, but there were no condoms wrappers in sight. Ken realized that in an alcoholic blackout, he had had unprotected sex with a stranger who might be HIV positive.
He pulled on his clothes. His wallet miraculously was in his pants pocket. His hands were shaking from booze and fear. Not wanting to face the reality of this stranger, he grabbed his shoes and ran outside.
Slipping away like a thief, he emerged from the beach house into the scalding midday sun. His eyes stung. What was he doing to himself? Why was he playing roulette with his life? He tucked in his rumpled shirt that smelled of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and perspiration and started his journey home.
If he didn’t get sober, he’d kill himself. This cold fact was clear. He didn’t want to die -- yet he acted like he did. He vowed that moment to get help and stop drinking. By God’s grace and Ken’s efforts to seek help, that night was his last drunk. Terror opened his eyes. One more unconscious night in a blackout with a stranger would kill him.
I wake up to save my life.
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The convenience of death
If we didn’t die from childhood abuse or die from the ways we tried to hide its reality through addiction and depression and self-destructive living, we must face the painful choice of coming to life. The frightening task looms before us. The price we pay for vibrant living is high -- we must feel what we have avoided, the dreaded feelings of the past: the isolation, shame and rejection we experienced, but could not feel as children. To feel these horrors is adult work. It is the catharsis of our personal tragedy, which will end, if we endure, in the birth of our true self.
We feel compassion for those who died in their addictions, or their depression, or their dissociation, taking their secret torture to their graves. They were our brothers and sisters, sacrificed on the altar of life, on the altar of human progress -- and human despair. It is too much for some to wake up -- they died instead. But their lives have meaning. Their memory and struggle compel us to feel the agony of our childhood, to face the crimes of our parents that linger as censoring ogres in our psyches, and to awaken to the sanctity and safety of our sacred home within ourselves.
Coming to consciousness is the death of illusion and the painful birth of reality. If we chose to live beyond death, vitality will come.
I didn’t die -- now I must live.
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Kill the Buddha
The adage goes: “If you meet the Buddha – kill him.” It’s not the Buddha we need to kill, but our parental voices in our psyches, the damning emotional residue from mother and father that freezes our feelings and cripples our expansive spirit. We must “kill”, expunge, and exorcise the traumatic effects of our limited parents that were implanted in our psyches in childhood and that still linger and unconsciously dominate our adult lives, thwarting our vitality, originality, and integrity.
“Kill the Buddha” means: if we give someone more power than we give ourselves, we have violated ourselves. We must eliminate any person, even god-like holy figures like the Buddha, or a god-like mother and father from the child’s point of view, who dominate our psyches and whom we esteem more than our own true selves and inner divinity. We must expunge these intruding personae from our psyches in order to honor our true and sacred self.
When God said: “Thou shalt have no gods before me”, he was expressing a similar idea. When we understand that God is within, that our sacred self is an extension of universal God, then any one who holds more power over our psyches than the God within is a form of idolatry. We must destroy any idols that have intruded into the temple of our being to be at one with God and with our sacred selves.
In that spirit, we must “kill” the maternal and paternal introjects and parent ourselves. As enlightened adults, the perfect parent has come at last. It is you and me -- and will be with us forever, even at our final breath.
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