Universe and terrestrial atmospheres. Painting. Rajasthan. c. 18th century A.D.

"From the Buddhist point of view, being in a depressed state, in a state of discouragement, is seen as a kind of extreme that can clearly be an obstacle to taking the steps necessary to accomplish one's goals. A state of self-hatred is even far more extreme than simply being discouraged, and this can be very, very dangerous. 

For those engaged in Buddhist practice, the antidote to self-hatred would be to reflect upon the fact that all beings, including oneself, have Buddha Nature--the seed or potential for perfection, full Enlightenment--no matter how weak or poor or deprived one's present situation may be. 

So those people involved in Buddhist practice who suffer from self-hatred or self-loathing should avoid contemplating the suffering nature of existence or the underlying unsatisfactory nature of existence, and instead they should concentrate more on the positive aspects of one's existence, such as appreciating the tremendous potential that lies within oneself as a human being. 

And by reflecting upon these opportunities and potentials, they will be able to increase their sense of worth and confidence in themselves."

~~  H.H. Dalai Lama & Howard C. Cutler, M.D., The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. Snow Lion Pub.

Q:

I have recurring suicidal thoughts. These thoughts frighten me. I don't want to hurt anyone in my family, especially my spouse and children. I love them so much! 

But I'm confused and bewildered by how strong and maybe even addictive the suicide thoughts are. 

I can really see "doing it". It feels like a great release, almost a spiritual experience. What is going on with me? I'm pretty sure I'll give in to these thoughts eventually, since they are becoming more and more pressing. 

Yes I'm depressed, but not every depressed person destroys themself. Why do I want to die?

A.

Karmic Nature of Thought

I agree with you that suicide has terrible consequences for the loved ones "left behind". Most of us have serious trouble getting in touch and staying in touch with our deceased beloved family and friends. So if only from the point of view of compassion, suicide is not a very nice thing to do to the people you love.

But I think there is something else important to consider. Exactly as you say, suicide urges are thoughts. You use the word "thought" five times in your question! 

You have a very important spiritual goal in this lifetime to try to get "behind" or "between" the compulsive experience of "thought". 

Suicidal thoughts are IMO the loudest possible wake-up call about the nature of Thought, and why the spirit cannot rest until one is able to separate the experience of "thinking a thought" from the experience of "just Be-ing".

Your Jyotisha nativity shows a strong but somewhat oppressed condition for Budha, who is the graha in charge of daily, repetitive mentality. One consequence of this Budha condition is a natural tendency toward negative, pessimistic, or alienating types of mental process. 

These negative thoughts are certainly not evil, in the sense of malintent. You are not trying to hurt anyone else. In fact, you are a very moral person! Your strong morality is evidenced by Shani's fierce drishti upon your Budha position in both radix and navamsha charts. Rather, the problem is one's naturally negative expectations and a level of Shani-imposed karmic bondage, or enslavement, to the experience of thought.

Sad tale of a Friend's suicide

Recently one of my best friends from childhood committed suicide. He was a very eccentric thinker in terms of planning and designing wonderful futures, but he was highly pessimistic about human nature. I used to rely on him to help me cut through my own idealistic expectations of people I worked with, to get his view on their likely motivation. 

This friend would always remind me, people are in it for themselves. Greed (survival) drives everything. Herd instinct. Safety. Ignorance. He'd always remind me of these unlovely human traits, and we'd laugh about my persistent romanticism. You don't get rich by being nice to people, Barbara, he'd say to me. Of course, he was always nice to me! But he was also a very wealthy man.

My friend is a wonderful teaching example, because he was indeed a very wealthy man. He had enough money to do anything that caught his interest. He was a skilled artist and musician, social visionary and connoisseur. He had a solid humanistic education.  In fact, his scholarly focus had been Philosophy -- but exclusively of the western rationalist variety. And this is where I think he fell.

My friend was a Thinker. He was raised with the highest western individualistic materialistic positivistic Calvinist values. He inherited the rational humanistic positivism of Descartes and Dewey. Everything in his family culture and in the business world around him told him to Think About It. "Think and Be Happy". "Think and Grow Rich". 

My friend was steeped in a culture of exalted mentalism. He richly paid by an information economy that rewards technical problem-solvers, rational systematizers, and purveyors of controlled, next-step, conceptual thought.

My friend was a paragon of his generation: a handsome, fit, forty-something polymath with tons of money, steady relationships, and a bright future. But he fell. He got sucked into negative thoughts. He managed to convince himself, through the dangerous practice of isolated negative thought repetition, that his entire world was collapsing and that he needed to kill himself before he got annihilated by mysterious evil forces.

What? Mysterious evil forces? This guy was an exemplary rational thinker! What happened?

Releasing ego attachment to mentality - "I think therefore I am"

I know my friend pretty well, and I have a strong belief about what happened. 

My friend would not, could not, and did not permit himself to stop thinking. He was so immersed in mentalized reality that he could not bear to detach himself from the bizarre clanking freightyard of his own thoughts. He died from acting on a super-negative thought, which he allowed to capture his full attention. Just as you say, thoughts are addictive. Thoughts are seductive. Thoughts are chained together, so one thought always leads to another. Some thoughts occur in VERY addictive, VERY compulsive short-loop sequences that are impossible to break without stepping out of the world of thought.

My friend was so ego-identified with thought that when he got sucked into a very bad space of being enslaved to that negative, short-loop thought that says "destroy yourself", he had no leverage. He couldn't get out of it. He told me somewhat about the mental descent he experienced: a path that would clinically be labeled as paranoid personality disorder. 

He needed to stop thinking in order to get some leverage on the compulsive mental process. But he couldn't stop thinking! There are many drugs that will shut down the human mental process, and much better than drugs there are excellent meditation practices which lead the mind "out of itself" by placing the consciousness in the spaces "between" the thoughts or "behind" the thoughts or even conceptually "above" the thoughts. The point is to get out of entrapment of thoughts!

In the end, it was the great misfortune of my friend to be tremendously overinvested in his culture's high appraisal of rational thought. His thoughts ate him alive. As the suicide thoughts gained inordinate power in his mind, he was unable to utilize any of the meditative practices to escape the clutches of those thoughts through physical, emotional, or spiritual means. 

He did not believe in therapeutic drugs, in psychotherapy, in taking the advice of friends, in seeking counsel with family, or in any form whatsoever of a Higher Power. He believed he was in charge and he and only he could control his thoughts.

Stepping away from Predatory, invasive thoughts

Despite the teaching of "positive thinking" advocates, there are many times in life when one cannot directly control one's thoughts.  

"Predatory" thoughts like suicidal seduction are of highly suspect psychic origin. They are probably not really your own thoughts. These thoughts are particularly dangerous and hard to control.

But without getting into the psychic nature of invasive foreign thoughts, it is still a fairly acceptable adult commonplace that, indeed, one can not always control one's thoughts. 

Therefore when predatory, life-threatening thoughts gain inordinate control of the mentality, survival makes it necessary to move the focus of consciousness completely out of the realm of thought, and into a safe, non-thought space. 

Ideally one aspires to avoid the negative thoughts and their mandates rather than chemically handicap those thoughts through unhealthy distractions or drugs. One can learn to remaining "awake" and committed to life while "avoiding" thoughts, i.e., not actively engaged in thinking. Rather, one is wide awake and observing those thoughts (quite intently!) to make sure they don't jump their banks and cause trouble in the lower emotional and physical particulate levels. 

Have a thought without "getting involved" - watch it flow by

Yes it's possible and indeed a very good skill to have: to learn to monitor thoughts without getting involved in the thoughts.

Skillfully avoid toxic materials in the thought stream is not "avoidance behavior" or "running from the problem". Rather it is a practical, top-down self-preservation strategy and a life-affirming act! 

And as a side benefit, this life-reserving practice develops considerable inner calm. It makes people nicer and more compassionate in the long run. (Although our goal right now is not to make you a Nice Person, but rather to keep you a Breathing Person!)

My friend's thoughts became so consciousness-dominating that he lost feedback from his physical senses. He had no emotional affect. Any generalized spiritual awareness which might have penetrated the causal-astral-fleshly bodies was trivialized by the massive, all-consuming voice of the Thought.

I have always felt that if my friend had applied some of his huge mental intelligence to acquiring the meditative skills needed to step *out* of the stream of thoughts, that he could have avoided falling victim to these predatory thoughts. He would have completed his incarnation and benefitted so many other beings along the way.  

Regulating intensity, preserving life

The physical body is not neutral territory. Pain and pleasure are acute: we need ways of getting out of pain sometimes, or it will annihilate the consciousness. We need to be able to step into and step out of the violent reactions of the animal body, through meditative practices which involve regulating emotion and thought, in order to avoid sensory brain overload!

The emotional body is certainly not neutral territory. Emotional pain can be far more devastating than physical pain, even though it seems more dispersed. Again we need to be able to step into and step out of the vast churning ocean of emotion, through meditative practices which involve thought and presence, in order to avoid emotional overload!

Most modern people know about regulating physical pain and emotional intensity in order to sustain their lives during difficult periods. When things get "unbearable", we have a host of culturally known remedies - from the drugstore to the therapy office to the streets. 

Yet as a culture, the modern West is excessively mentalized, and it is not yet widely aware that thoughts, too, can run wildly out of control. Thoughts can kill just like a broken heart or a car wreck.

Step one: therapeutic support

My advice is to get thee to a reputable prescribing psychotherapist, and please be shockingly honest with the licensed healer about where your thoughts are going. 

Unless you pose a clear and present danger to self or others, you probably won't lose your freedom by being honest in a confidential medical relationship. Consider using anti-depressive or anti-psychotic medications on a *short-term* basis to disable the thoughts temporarily.

Long term solution

The key word is temporarily. Few people want to live their life in a numbed out druggy fog.  

As soon as one notices that those huge, dominating, short-loop, compulsive thoughts of suicide and annihilation are "gone" for a couple of days, it's time to start getting serious about a longer-term meditation solution.

The meditation practices take time to get established, so it is smart to stay in therapeutic treatment until one is fully secure in the practice.

Learning to "step outside" of the thought stream

The longer-term solution isn't drugs, and it isn't talk-therapy or behavior mod or "positive thinking" or any other physical, emotional, or mental method either. (Although I am not casting aspersions on those methods for those who cannot access the meditative path.)

The longer-term solution to victimization and exploitation by repeating negative thoughts is learning the meditative practices that will quickly and effectively move the consciousness *out* of the grid-lock anxious violent congested flooding traffic of thought.

Finding a healing sanctuary, getting away from physical pain

It works with physical pain. Move the consciousness to a place in the body which is not hurting, and the awareness of pain will recede. One of my elderly relatives died a horrible cancer death, wracked with pain as it seemed like every cell in her body was poisoned and torn. 

A swami from the local ashram came in to sit with her. Let's find a place that doesn't hurt, said the swami. But oh! said my relative -- EVERYTHING hurts, I am in the most horrifying state of total acute pain! 

The calm and confident swami said, let's scan your body and find a pain-free spot. It took them a few minutes, of searching the body by quadrant, but they found, together, several places that didn't hurt at all. The tips of some fingers, I think I remember, and several small toes. 

And that knowledge, that refuge, that sanctuary created by finding a small place of freedom from the obsessive, torturing nerve pain  -- finding that place allowed my relative to practice breathing. 

Her eyes began to glow. I want to tell you that she died in a state of extremely deep peace after having lived a full life in service to many people. I will always be intensely grateful to that swami for what she taught me not by principle, but by working example. "Find a place where it doesn't hurt." 

Sanctuary from obsessive, destructive thoughts

When one is seeking sanctuary from enslavement to destructive thoughts, one must find the "place where it doesn't hurt".  It is essential to seek refuge from these compulsive thoughts, which carry the frightening possibility that one might cause serious harm to one's beloved friends and family. 

Meditative practices which create a reliable path guiding the consciousness out of the deep-carved channels of  compulsive thought are not an amusement for you at this point. They are not optional, not something to do when one "has time", or a special activity reserved for the annual spiritual retreat. 

It is essential and life-saving for the suicidal person to learn to identify the different energy bodies (spiritual, causal, astral, physical) and to practice the mental discipline of conscious separation from the thought stream, with regularity and vigor! This is the way out of the otherwise terrible fate that suicidal thoughts create.

The "place" where the consciousness goes when it is not thinking, not feeling, and not responding to the five senses, is located in the interstitial layers "between" the thoughts. These spaces are sometimes called "empty" in the literature but they are really not "empty" at all. In the spaces between thoughts there is abundant nourishing prana and rejuvenating nectar of divine love. This is a very cool place to be. It is a much, much better place to be than being dragged behind an out-of-control freight train of life-destroying thoughts, worrying constantly about what might happen to self and others! 

Controlling not the thoughts, but one's reaction to the thoughts

One cannot really control one's thoughts directly. 

However one can be totally in control of one's *reaction* to one's thoughts. The position of control is a seat of "witness" or observer role, which is located within viewing distance but not in the actual stream of thoughts.

That seat of "witness" is the ultimate "safe space" where "it doesn't hurt".

If one is dealing with suicidal thoughts is it **essential** that one locate this seat of witness and retreat there, out of the rushing freeway traffic of thoughts, the *minute* that a self-destructive thought appears in consciousness.

---

(The stream of organically interconnected thought is pretty much driven by karmic law. I know, it feels like one is making choices and at the immediate daily level that's true (such as, one might read this article and find a prescribing psychotherapist then undertake serious meditation training!) But at the macro level, the size, shape, and contents of the thought stream is significantly predetermined by past-life driven karmic script. It would take a huge amount of energy to change an in-process thought - similar metaphorically to splitting an atom. It's much easier and more practical to just step outside the thought stream until the dangerous thought goes by!)

Getting back in service to those you love

But anyway not to worry about the theory. 

The task is to get you our of the clutches of suicidal thoughts, and back in service to those you love.

With sincere best wishes,

Barbara Pijan Lama, Jyotisha

www.barbarapijan.com 

updated: 19 June 2010  

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