My transformative encounters with suicide
Life is always accompanied by suffering, and suffering heightens the urgency of our search for meaning. Inquiries into the meaning of life are universal, but those who have attempted suicide seek the answers with special intensity. In confronting death, theirs has been a most rigorous spiritual practice—an unceasing meditation on life and death.
Richard Heckler, WAKING UP, ALIVE: THE DESCENT,
THE SUICIDE ATTEMPT...AND THE RETURN TO LIFE
This quote beautifully captures the significance that my encounters with death have had in my life, and the way the depth of my suicidal despair has brought me to the height of transcendent insight. Regardless of the question of specific underlying causes, I have found myself profoundly contemplating death on the pretext of preparing for it via suicide several times over the course of most of my adult life. Of particular importance in these contemplations is that, because the sense of mortal crisis at times made actually dying feel like a very real and even imminent prospect, I was drawn to probe ever deeper to the root of my fear, the fear that not only kept me from taking myself out, but that I could see and feel was at the core of my orientation of resistance to life or being.
This drive to get to the root of the fear has been key for me, because with each instance of approaching the edge of self-destruction only to back away, it became increasingly intolerable for me to write off the failure to make the leap as simply “the fear of death” — a vague term that can cover some very disparate assumptions. Two things became clear as I explored the matter in more depth. First, what most people seem to mean by the fear of death is the fear of coming to an absolute end, of ceasing to exist once and for all. Second, not only was that not my fear, it was exactly what I was hoping death would be, because only absolute nonbeing would ensure no further suffering now or evermore, even if it would also necessarily mean forfeiting the potential for less constricted or more transcendent expressions of being to arise again at some point. And so the corollary of this is that the specific fear which always kept me from taking myself out was the possibility that death, rather than being the hoped for nothing of an absolute end, would instead be yet another traumatic birth-like transition into a potentially even scarier and more painful something. (See my essay What the fear of death is really about.)
This is where my life's first instance of suicidal despair leading to transcendent insight comes in, because it was during an especially intense contemplation of nothing as the hoped-for result of my fourth engagement with suicide (in my mid-thirties) that there occured an almost satori-like epiphany that there is no such thing as nothing in the absolute sense (though in a relative sense, nothing as in no-thing, or no perceptible experience, is very much a reality — e.g., the abeyance of dreamless sleep and general anesthesia, as well as the apparent lacuna before life). It was simply seen that the source and substance of this or, indeed, any reality is eternal, unbound, and transcends all notions of something versus nothing, thus rendering my suicide attempts metaphysically futile. I had been desperate to know that when ‘my’ light goes out, so to speak, that will be the end once and for all. But this was revealed to be an impossibility, because my light is not other than anyone’s light or the predicate of light as such, and there is no way of turning it off, no way of obviating its potential to appear as ‘I’ in some form or other.
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Well now, this piece was originally conceived as more of a narrative overview of my encounters with suicide, but it seems I've jumped straightaway into the philosophical deep end! So, to shift into storytelling mode, here's a bit more on the role suffering has had on both my seeking and finding (to wit, all but the first of the following four episodes preceded a period of significant growth).
My first encounter with death, at the age of 22, found me sitting on a bench in a tiny neighborhood park late one night, with a loaded gun which I don’t think I ever removed from my boot — figuring I’d know when I was ready to put the gun to my head and shoot, and in the meantime considering it prudent, given the venue, to keep the piece well-hidden. I remember walking around the neighborhood either before or most likely after the “attempt,” and being stopped and questioned by a cruising neighborhood patrol person. So on top of my already rarefied state, having by then spent many hours brooding on what I was sure was my imminent death, I got this cold shot of adrenaline as I played twenty questions with this well-intentioned rent-a-cop, while, unbeknownst to him, a loaded .22 was strapped to my leg.
The second encounter with death, on the 31st of October roughly a year later, occurred in my apartment, and is the first time I actually put the loaded gun to my head, with every intention of pulling the trigger (this time, I’d even composed pertinent notes to my mother, sister, and landlady). Interestingly, as with the unexpected run-in during a neighborhood walk on the night of the first “attempt,”1 on this night, too, I went for a walk late in the evening as I pondered what I intended to do. On my way back to my apartment, as I approached a small neighborhood fire station, something suddenly jumped out in front of me from behind a hedge, followed by laughter a slight distance away. It being Halloween, and these being firefighters with lots of downtime, they’d decided to have a little fun with passersby by reeling out something ghoulish on a string. Momentarily stunned, I nervously laughed along with them, but also couldn’t avoid the sense of macabre portent in the little incident.
On a more significant note, though, this “attempt” preceded serious practice of a spiritual teaching and methodology that I'd first encountered and been impressed with about a year prior. This serious practice, which also included a group-work component, lasted several years and bore numerous benefits both psychological and practical. Also worthy of note here is that there was some compelling synchronicity that led me to this first teacher and group less than a year later. That teacher (a Ph.D. psychologist and astrologer) ended up becoming a mentor and friend to me, and one of the most important people in my life overall.
The third encounter with death (between ages 27 and 28) didn’t entail the actual handling of the gun, but was serious enough nonetheless. It was most notable for having preceded the timely discovery of Kierkegaard’s THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH, which was so profound a cartography of despair that I felt I’d been diagnosed by (and I cringe at this term now) “a doctor of the soul.” This book inspired in me the cultivation of a deep trust (or what Kierkegaard would've called faith) that whatever happens will be not just endurable, but acceptable.
The fourth and, to date, last encounter (ages 36 to 37), as with the third, never really got beyond the brooding and planning stage, but due to its protracted intensity and the cumulative drain of precedent, I recognize it as being nearly as serious as any of the previous incidents.2 This is also the one alluded to in the intro, where the contemplation of a primordial or absolute "nothing" triggered a satori-like epiphany — the deepest insight I'd ever had up to that point. More prosaically, this one also preceded my taking up weight lifting, which became an anchoring discipline for many years and marked the only extended period in my adult life when I largely — and consciously — back-burnered my spiritual interests in favor of more extroverted and mundane pursuits.3 It was a dramatic instance of almost literally bootstrapping myself from a suicidal despair.
The spiritual interests began to reenter the picture during 2010, and in earnest around the middle of 2011, and between autumn of that year and early winter of 2012 there occurred a couple of (relatively) subtle but decisive transcendent insights4 that, among other things, had the unanticipated effect of immediately ending my fitness-oriented lifestyle — something I’d previously considered inconceivable.5 There then followed a sort of post-awakening honeymoon period that lasted up to the fall of 2012, when and where the next and by far longest lasting phase of despair began to make itself apparent.
During the summer of 2017, after much reflection and planning, I undertook a monthlong fast on water alone. I'd long been attracted to fasting, not so much for physical health reasons (I've always been uncommonly healthy physically), but as a discipline that felt like praying with one's whole being. Since I've never been religious, and at this point of my story wasn't even particularly "spiritual" anymore, a marathon fast like this felt like the only way for me to manifest my wish for a more complete transformation than had yet come about. I can't say the fast had an immediate effect, but within two years I did begin to notice a subtle but unmistakable sense of at-easeness and contentment with myself and with life. I hope to post more writing about this at some point.
For anyone who's read this far and is still curious to know more about me, there's An "about me" biosketch in 10 bullet points.
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1 Rendering the word “attempt” in quotes is my way of acknowledging that even my sincerest intention to end my life still fell one critical step short of, say, actually pulling the trigger and waking up to find I’d been in a coma for a week or a month, and that the gun had malfunctioned or the bullet had only partially discharged, resulting in serious but non-lethal brain damage. Now that’s an attempt. Maybe I should be calling these episodes near attempts.
2 Although I still had the gun, my thought this time was that I'd fast to death. I actually did embark on what turned out to be a 47 day quasi-fast, though in reality it was more of a liquid diet (fruit & veggie juices, broth, and lots of water). This turned out to be inadvertently transformative, as it set the stage for the bodybuilding phase that immediately followed, which truly was transformative, both physically and, to a lesser extent, psychologically.
3 Aside from the bodybuilding and the intense dietary focus that supported it, examples include the acquisition of a personal training certification, numerous forays into online dating, a 4x4 variation of a muscle car hobby in which I bought a series of souped up lifted Jeeps, and my longest lasting job to date (several years vs. my more typical several months).
4 It should also be noted here that these particular transcendent insights did not occur in the context of despair or pondering death or preparing to take myself out. I'd been to a sort of group retreat or seeker conference (or what one participant half-jokingly referred to as a "gurupalooza" since it featured talks by a number of otherwise ordinary people (though definitely not "gurus"; many weren't even spiritual teachers) who'd undergone the shift or transformation known as enlightenment).
It was in the week after returning from this event that "something happened" as I pondered the nature of awareness. Like suddenly getting a cosmic joke, an epiphany dawned that brought wave after wave of simultaneous laughter and tears. Nothing new or novel was established in this, but rather what has always been the case (not just for me, but universally) was now seen as beyond obvious, and the resulting figure-ground reversal has been my reality ever since.
Then, a few months later, during a solitary retreat and two-week water fast, another veil-lifting insight occurred, this time revealing the incredible mirage-like nature of all phenomena, including "myself." This is what Buddhists refer to as emptiness, but unlike the colloquial meaning of the word as an absence of objects (e.g., an empty room), or feelings of loss or bereavement ("She felt empty inside"), here it means the insubstantial and voidlike nature of objects themselves (and n.b. that almost everything that defines oneself is an object: thoughts, emotions, perceptions... basically, if it arises as an experience, however subtle, it's an object. The important point is that it's all equally empty).
But while all phenomena and experience are empty, they are also luminous and permeated with the infinite potential of their ever-present source (and note that source and substance are not two things).
5 Not that I swore off the lifting, but I found I’d become so quiet and still inside that I no longer had any interest in spending my energy in strenuous recreational exertion.