Truth about Suicide and its Rightness
Neale Donald Walsch: “I need to talk about suicide. Why is there such a taboo against the ending of one’s life?”
God: “Indeed, why is there?”
Neale Donald Walsch: “You mean it’s not wrong to kill yourself?”
God: “The question cannot be answered to your satisfaction, because the question itself contains two false concepts; it is based on two false assumptions; it contains two errors.
The first false assumption is that there is such a thing as “right” and “wrong.” The second false assumption is that killing is possible. Your question itself, therefore, disintegrates the moment it is dissected.
“Right” and “wrong” are philosophical polarities in a human value system which have nothing to do with ultimate reality—a point which I have made repeatedly throughout this dialogue. They are, furthermore, not even constant constructs within your own system, but rather, values which keep shifting from time to time.
You are doing the shifting, changing your mind about these values as it suits you (which rightly you should, as evolving beings), yet insisting at each step along the way that you haven’t done this, and that it is your unchanging values which form the core of your society’s integrity. You have thus built your society on a paradox. You keep changing your values, all the while proclaiming that it is unchanging values which you … well, value!
The answer to the problems presented by this paradox is not to throw cold water on the sand in an attempt to make it concrete, but to celebrate the shifting of the sand. Celebrate its beauty while it holds itself in the shape of your castle, but then also celebrate the new form and shape it takes as the tide comes in.
Celebrate the shifting sands as they form the new mountains you would climb, and atop which—and with which—you will build your new castles. Yet understand that these mountains and these castles are monuments to change, not to permanence.
Glorify what you are today, yet do not condemn what you were yesterday, nor preclude what you could become tomorrow.
Understand that “right” and “wrong” are figments of your imagination, and that “okay” and “not okay” are merely announcements of your latest preferences and imaginings.
For example, on the question of ending one’s life, it is the current imagining of the majority of people on your planet that it is “not okay” to do that.
Similarly, many of you still insist that it is not okay to assist another who wishes to end his or her life.
In both cases you say this should be “against the law.” You have come to this conclusion, presumably, because the ending of the life occurs relatively quickly. Actions which end a life over a somewhat longer period of time are not against the law, even though they achieve the same result.
Thus, if a person in your society kills himself with a gun, his family members lose insurance benefits. If he does so with cigarettes, they do not.
If a doctor assists you in your suicide, it is called manslaughter, while if a tobacco company does, it is called commerce.
With you, it seems to be merely a question of time. The legality of self-destruction— the “rightness” or “wrongness” of it—seems to have much to do with how quickly the deed is done, as well as who is doing it. The faster the death, the more “wrong” it seems to be. The slower the death, the more it slips into “okayness.”
Interestingly, this is the exact opposite of what a truly humane society would conclude. By any reasonable definition of what you would call “humane,” the shorter the death, the better. Yet your society punishes those who would seek to do the humane thing, and rewards those who would do the insane.
It is insane to think that endless suffering is what God requires, and that a quick, humane end to the suffering is “wrong.”
“Punish the humane, reward the insane.” This is a motto which only a society of beings with limited understanding could embrace.
So you poison your system by inhaling carcinogens, you poison your system by eating food treated with chemicals that over the long run kill you, and you poison your system by breathing air which you have continually polluted. You poison your system in a hundred different ways over a thousand different moments, and you do this knowing these substances are no good for you. But because it takes a longer time for them to kill you, you commit suicide with impunity.
If you poison yourself with something that works faster, you are said to have done something against moral law.
Now I tell you this: It is no more immoral to kill yourself quickly than it is to kill yourself slowly.”
- Conversations with God, Book 3
“And we say, or you could be like the cat who chooses to get run over, or you could just lie down in your bed happily one night, so content and thoughtless (Fun), wanting nothing in this physical world, and just reemerge into Pure Positive Energy. In other words, you can play it out any way you choose. But don’t worry about how anybody else plays it out.”
“And you know, sometimes animals get sick because they really are ready to go but they live in a house that doesn’t want them to go. And that’s the point of resistance. Don’t you often hear stories of loved ones who are in the hospital, or on what is called their ‘death bed’, who have people lingering, lingering – they’re hardly taking a shower; they’re staying night and day. And then they step out into the hallway for one minute to go to the bathroom, and they come back and they’re gone. And we say they leave at the crack of least resistance. In other words, they’ve been trying to get out of there for a long time, and it’s really hard to go when there’s somebody there saying “Don’t go; don’t go; don’t go; don’t go.” So then some of them (the wiser ones) get really sick, and then you say “Oh, go, go. It’s better that you go.”
~Abraham speaking in Sedona, AZ on August 27, 2005
“Every death is suicide because you are the only ones who can offer your vibration.”
“You don’t need to destroy your body until the choice is live or die. Death feels better from this place of fear of death, and that’s what so many people are doing. They have such dread of death – you give people the death penalty, for heaven’s sakes. Don’t you find that interesting? If you knew what death really was, you’d be giving them the death reward! You wouldn’t give it to those buggers that you’re so mad at. (Fun)”
“And so almost the day you’re born you start worrying about death. Someone dies and you say “Oh, I’m so sorry!” And what you really want to say is “Well, isn’t that nice? Isn’t that nice that this person is completing their cycle and reemerging into Pure Positive Energy, and becoming utterly at one with who they are, and dropping, in one fell swoop, all resistance and becoming one with Infinite Intelligence, and now remembering who they are and all that they’re about and living in this endless joy and still having access to all of us.” In other words, there is not one reason to ever feel one little particle of sorry about someone dying.”
~Abraham speaking in Sedona, AZ on August 27, 2005
Truth about Control over Life and Death
“It is not understood that before life an individual decides to live. A self is not simply the accidental personification of the body’s biological mechanism. Each person born desires to be born. He dies when that desire no longer operates. No epidemic or illness or natural disaster — or stray bullet from a murderer’s gun — will kill a person who does not want to die.
The desire for life has been most flaunted, yet human psychology has seldom dealt with the quite active desire for death. In its natural form this is not a morbid, frightened, neurotic, or cowardly attempt to escape life, but a definite, positive, “healthy” acceleration of the desire for survival, in which the individual strongly wants to leave physical life as once the child wanted to leave the parent’s home.
(11:44.) I am not speaking here of the desire for suicide, which involves a definite killing of the body by self-deliberate means — often of a violent nature. Ideally this desire for death, however, would simply involve the slowing of the body’s processes, the gradual disentanglement of psyche from flesh; or in other instances, according to individual characteristics, a sudden, natural stopping of the body’s processes.
Left alone, the self and the body are so entwined that the separation would be smooth. The body would automatically follow the wishes of the inner self. In the case of suicide, for example, the self is to some extent acting out of context with the body, which still has its own will to live.”
“Often, for example, a person wanting to die originally intended to experience only a portion of earth life, say childhood. This purpose would be entwined with the parents’ intent. Such a son or daughter might be born, for instance, through a woman who wanted to experience childbirth but who did not necessarily want to encounter the years of child-raising, for her own reasons.
Such a mother would attract a consciousness who desired, perhaps, to reexperience childhood but not adulthood, or who might teach the mother lessons sorely needed. Such a child might naturally die at 10 or 12, or earlier. Yet the ministrations of science might keep the child alive far longer, until such a person [begins] encountering an adulthood thrust upon him or her, so to speak.
An automobile accident, suicide, or another kind of accident might result. The person might fall prey to an epidemic, but the smoothness of biological motion or psychological motion has been lost. I am not here condoning suicide, for too often in your society it is the unfortunate result of conflicting beliefs — and yet it is true to say that all deaths are suicide, and all births deliberate on the part of child and parent. To that extent, you cannot separate issues like a population explosion on the part of certain portions of the world, from epidemics, earthquakes, and other disasters.“
- SETH (The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events)
