Suicide

There is, however, a second form of suicide and that is a very slow and very deliberate killing of oneself through neglect, usually neglect of diet or mental health. People can want to kill themselves but for one reason or another (such as the extreme effect of suicide on your friends and relatives or the loss of insurance money due to a "suicide clause") the person does not have the option of open, sudden suicide.

In point of fact this decision to commit a slow suicide may not even be one that a person is consciously aware of. It may be reached in the darkest levels of a person's mind, the levels where there is virtually no hope, no light, no life and no joy.

Can we will ourselves to death? I think so. Not in a fantastically dramatic fashion, but subtly, taking some time, still with the same result.

While on the subject of death, let's look briefly at the concept of some New Agers that a person's death is really brought about by that person. Such people believe that no matter how the person died, even in the most violent and horrible way, it is something that they had planned between lives and that we should not interfere. Hence, the starving people in various African countries are starving on purpose and we would be interfering with their karma if we fed them.

Another example given in one new-age movie was of a busload of people who had been killed, and one person's observation that they had all chosen to die at that time.

That begins to bother me, for two reasons. First, the statistical probabilities of having exactly that particular set of people in that car or on that plane at that exact time, and at the same time have absolutely no "innocents" on board seems to beggar the imagination. Secondly, suicide is not an individual act.

When a person commits suicide (or, as in the above cases, manages to set things up so they die but not necessarily by their own hand), they are killing themselves, granted. But their suicide will have an effect on other people: their parents, loved ones, friends, acquaintances, etc. Who knows where the actual effects will end? Who can forget someone who commits suicide? The memory stays with you your entire life.

So suicide is not an individual act. If a large group of people die, I do not see how this can be "suicide" in any way, shape, or form, as the effects of all these deaths would reach far, far beyond the people, as just noted.

So some death, at least, can be a form of suicide, either direct or indirect, but some death (especially when it involves a relatively large number of people who die at the same time in the same place through no overt fault of their own),just is. We are animals (Homo sapiens) living on Mother Earth, subject to the laws of biology, physics, and chemistry that have been established in this particular universe. Some things just happen. Period.