Suicide and Liberation
Originally posted to the Dharma Overground forum, in response to
another participant's lengthy and contentious thread with this title
The topic of this thread is something I’ve explored in depth over many years, often with a sense of urgency since it’s been fueled by a number of brushes with suicide. Several of the views you express, I’ve come to as well, though I might substantiate some of them differently than you have. For whatever it might be worth, I’d like to share a few of my own thoughts on these topics.
First, the claims I agree with you about are:
1) that no one knows for sure what happens after death;
2) that no one knows whether suicide carries metaphysical repercussions that dying any other way does not;
3) that enlightenment is not an absolute (“forever”) liberation;
4) that views contradicting each of the foregoing claims tend to be steeped in scripture, dogma, and/or secondhand testimony, each of which is fallible.
Now I’ll elaborate on each of these claims from my own perspective:
1) It might be more accurate to say that no one knows exactly what happens after death. Tibetans Buddhists have their bardos; Christians their heaven, hell, and purgatory; near death experiencers have any number of novel afterlife scenarios; atheist materialists have their oblivion or annihilation, etc. So many beliefs, so little consensus.
And yet, I submit that one thing about death you can know with certainty is what doesn’t happen — namely, the once-and-for-all vanishing into permanent nothing that materialists believe in. Not that this can be proven logically, else there wouldn’t be so many people who believe otherwise. Neither does it mean that whatever remains untouched by death is “you” in the sense of your familiar narrative stream. But along the lines of the open individualism you linked to in your first post, once you’ve discriminatively identified in yourself the element of pure, impersonal subjectivity implicit in all arisings, and grokked that it’s the sole identity of any possible reality, then you’ll know that — like it or not — death isn’t final.
2) Once it’s directly recognized that death offers no possibility of an absolute end, suicide no longer promises the “relief” of oblivion, and so tends to lose at least some of its allure. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a futile gesture. For all anyone really knows, suicide could just be the way some are meant to die, with nothing unnatural, wrong, or karmically hazardous about it; and perhaps it, along with any other mode of death, could function like the pressing of an existential reset button, with no karmic residue carried beyond the reboot.
Of course, even if this clean reboot is what happens, the form that arises “next” as you could be literally anything. But it’s also possible that there actually is some metempsychosic continuity carried into whatever comes next, regardless of the manner of death. And if that were the case — or if there’s nagging uncertainty about it one way or the other — it might be prudent to approach death with a minimum of ignorance concerning what you are.
As an addendum to this, you can check out a brief Quora response I wrote, which outlines a couple of what I think are plausible naturalistic (i.e., non-spiritual) ways the foregoing potentials could play out: [NOTE: this is now available on the present site as Two naturalistic afterlife possibilities.]
3) Regarding enlightenment not being a truly final or absolute liberation, my way of arriving at this seems to be different from yours. You see it as incompatible with emptiness, but I don’t agree. Emptiness is simply the fundamentally insubstantial or void-like nature of everything as it is. As such, emptiness does not and cannot preclude anything from being the case, much as in a dream or mirage.
As I see it, the problem with the notion of liberation as an absolute end to cycles of rebirth is that it violates one of the most universally obvious and incontrovertible truths: that any arising is subject to change, and that this pertains equally to non-arising. Or, to put it in more generic terms, conditions of both something and nothing are impermanent. Anything that has a beginning must have an end, and any end must be followed by something beginning. It doesn’t matter that these dichotomies are only apparent and not real, and that fundamentally they aren’t even two things at all. Why? Because no matter what is animating this incredible multimedia light show, and no matter how radically unmanifest it really is, it seems clear that it plays out in the form of cycles — cycles of contraction and release, ignorance and enlightenment, suffering and liberation, seeking and finding, sleeping and waking, birth and death, etc. So, if this grand play of contracting into apparent subject/object, and then seeking and perchance finding liberation from the suffering inherent in that entirely self-imposed condition, is an eternally recurring play, then the idea that there’s some way to end the play via permanently transcending it strikes me as naïve.
Having said that, none of this should be taken to mean that enlightenment is not worth every effort and sacrifice to realize in this life, if you want to suffer less and understand more. Additionally, it’s good to consider the possibility that the more profound the changes of orientation this realization leads to, the less bothersome all these metaphysical propositions will tend to be.
4) I will touch on the appeal to authority point by addressing a related claim you make which I partly agree with, but partly disagree with: that, as you put it, “personal experience doesn't give you any solid ground to make ontological claims.” I agree that personal experience can’t be turned into an objective proof of an ontological claim, as a strategy to convince others. But I also think that your own direct insights would serve to authoritatively resolve both ontological and epistemological questions for yourself, and that this is the only proof you’d ever need or want.