Theosophy

Sylvia Cranston and Carey Williams – USA

[Condensed from Reincarnation:A New Horizon in Science, Religion, and Society, Ch. 22, pp. 301-08, Theosophical University Press, 1999 edition. This excerpt is reproduced on Theosophy Forward in a slightly revised format to fit the magazine’s template. Permission is granted to reprint one time this article written and published by Anita Atkins (aka-Sylvia Cranston) and Carey Williams to Jan Nicolaas Kind, publisher of Theosophy Forward. Copyright Owner: Dr. Caren  M. Elin, September 5, 2017].

Several years ago, a friend of one of the authors phoned her in a state of acute alarm. She had just discovered a suicide note written by her daughter, but the girl had yet to take her life. Something must be done fast! On two previous occasions, the girl had slashed her wrists. This time she was disconsolate over a severed love affair. A copy of Raymond Moody’s Life After Life, with the parts on suicide marked for attention, was rushed over to her house. The mother later reported that, not only did her daughter change her mind about destroying herself, she was so enthralled by other parts of this book on near-death experiences, she kept reading parts aloud to her mother.

It was with a gratifying surprise that we subsequently learned that the remedy we offered was being employed by a professional psychologist. Dr. Kenneth Ring reports this in his book Life at Death: A Scientific investigation of the Near-Death Experience (1) “Exposure to near-death research findings can apparently be helpful in reducing the likelihood of suicide. Psychologist John McDonagh practices what he calls ‘bibliotherapy’ with his suicidally-minded patients. He simply has them read Moody’s book Life After Life. His findings? It works.”

Now what did Dr. Moody say in Life After Life on suicide? He says he has frequently been asked, “Have you ever interviewed anyone who has had a near-death experience in association with a suicide attempt? If so, was the experience any different?”

He replied, “I do know of a few cases in which a suicide attempt was the cause of the apparent ‘death.’ These experiences were uniformly characterized as being unpleasant. As one woman said, ‘If you leave here a tormented soul, you will be a tormented soul over there, too.’ In short, they report that the conflicts they had attempted suicide to escape from were still present when they died, but with added complications. In their disembodied state they were unable to do anything about their problems, and they also had to view the unfortunate consequences which resulted from their acts. A man who was despondent about the death of his wife shot himself, ‘died’ as a result, and was resuscitated. He states: ‘I didn’t go where [my wife] was, I went to an awful place. ... I immediately saw the mistake I had made. ... I thought, ‘I wish I hadn’t done it.’”

“Others who experienced this unpleasant ‘limbo’ state have remarked that they had the feeling they would be there for a long time. This was their penalty for ‘breaking the rules,’ by trying to release themselves prematurely from what was, in effect, an ‘assignment’ – to fulfill a certain purpose in life.”(2)

In his subsequent volume Reflections on Life After Life, Dr. Moody had more to say:

“At the time I completed the manuscript of my first book, I had encountered very few significant cases of near-death resulting from attempted suicide. I think this is understandable in that persons who have had such experiences might be more reluctant to talk about them because of possible residual guilt feelings about the attempt. Since that time, however, I have come upon some additional cases. All of these people agree on one point: they felt their suicidal attempts solved nothing. They found that they were involved [in the other world] in exactly the same problems from which they had been trying to extricate themselves by suicide. Whatever difficulty they had been trying to get away from was still there on the other side, unresolved.”

One person mentioned being “trapped” in the situation which had provoked her suicide attempt. [It was] repeated again and again, as if in a cycle. “I would go through it once and at the end I would think, ‘Oh I’m glad that’s over,’ and then it would start all over again, and I would think, ‘Oh, no, not this again.’” (3)

According to psychiatrist George Ritchie, one of the worst fates of a suicide is that after death, he can see the misery caused to others by his act of self-destruction. Among the places Dr. Ritchie was taken by his celestial guide during his own near-death experience was a house where a younger man was following an older one from room to room. “I’m sorry, Pa!” he kept saying. “I didn’t know what it would do to Mama! I didn’t understand.” But though Ritchie could hear the young man clearly, it was obvious that the man he was speaking to could not. The old man was carrying a tray into a room where an elderly woman sat in bed. “I’m sorry, Pa,” the young man said again. “I’m sorry, Mama.” Endlessly, over and over, to ears that could not hear. In bafflement I turned to the Brightness beside me. But though I felt His compassion flow like a torrent into the room before us, no understanding lighted my mind.

Several times we paused before similar scenes. A boy trading a teenage girl through the corridors of a school. “I’m sorry, Nancy!”

Then there was a middle-aged woman begging a gray-haired man to forgive her. Ritchie turned pleadingly to his guide: ‘“Why do they keep talking to people who can’t hear them?’ Then from the Light beside me came the thought: They are suicides, chained to every consequence of their acts. This idea stunned me, yet I knew it came from Him, not me, for I now saw no more scenes like these, as though the truth He was teaching had been learned.”(4)

There is an apparent healing message for those left behind in these experiences of people who have taken their lives. By understanding the miserable state in which such loved ones temporarily exist – for it does not last indefinitely. Survivors can shorten its period by sending the victims thoughts of love and forgiveness, thus helping them overcome the guilt feelings that chain them to their former deed.

There are many factors, some quite ameliorating, that contribute to persons taking their lives. Dr. Kenneth Ring made a study of these when interviewing suicidal near-death survivors. But, whether the act seemed justified or not, he discovered that “the most striking feature of suicide-related near-death experiences that sets them apart” from other NDE’s is:

“ … among our suicide attempters, no one reported the tunnel phenomenon, or saw a brilliant but comforting light, or encountered a presence, or was temporarily reunited with loved ones who had died, or entered into a transcendent world of preternatural beauty. Instead the suicide-related core experience tends to be truncated, aborted, damped down.”

It does begin with a feeling of relief or peace and continues with a sense of bodily detachment to the same degree as other categories. But it tends to end, if it gets this far at all, with a feeling of confused drifting in a dark or murky void a sort of “twilight zone.” (5)

Because they were revived, these people had an opportunity to complete their natural life. What, then, was the effect of their NDE experience? Dr. Bruce Greyson, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan Medical Center (Ann Arbor), reports on this. He has studied in his area, and his current focus is on attempted suicides. Those who have been resuscitated, he says, “come out with a real sense of purpose in their lives. Although death is no longer fearful, life has become more meaningful.””(6)

Why has it become more meaningful? They are now convinced that life on earth, despite its difficulties, is a continuing, growing process; death is not a dead end. Do they now believe that death leads ultimately to rebirth? The 1981-82 Gallup poll survey of religious beliefs in the United States disclosed that 31 percent of those who had near-death encounters thereafter “believe in reincarnation, as opposed to 23 percent of the general public.”(7)

Thoughts of Reincarnation Can Prevent Self-Destruction. The life of Richard Wagner holds an example of this. After years of struggle and failure, he wrote to Hans Bulow on September 27, 1858: “I cannot take my life, for the Will to accomplish the Object of Art would draw me back into life again until I realize that Object, and so I would only be reentering this circle of tears and misery.” (8) At another time, speaking of the discouraging contrasts in human development, some people being so very much less advanced than others, he said, “Only the profoundly conceived idea of reincarnation could give me any consolation, since that belief shows how all at last can reach complete redemption. . . . Thus all the terrible tragedy of life is seen to be nothing but the sense of separateness in me and Space.” (9)

Another aborted suicide came to the attention of one of the present writers when we were speaking at the Findhorn Foundation in northern Scotland several years ago. A woman introduced herself after the lecture and confided that, as a child and young adult, she had a persistent vision of a rope around her neck. She was certain she had previously hung herself. Although she was strongly suicidal in this life, the vision warned her against repeating the act. Now she has conquered this tendency.

Tolstoy struggled with suicidal thoughts at the height of his literary fame and prosperity. On February 13, 1896, he wrote in his diary, “How interesting it would be to write the story of experiences in this life of a man who killed himself in his previous life; how he now stumbles against the very demands which had offered themselves before, until he arrives at the realization that he must fulfil those demands. Remembering the lesson, this man will be wiser than others.””(10)

The Likeliest Candidates for Suicide. “Life is not easy,” observed Dr. Gortler. We should add that it is purposely not easy, for without challenges people would never grow or acquire the stamina to face and over-come all difficulties. It seems significant, therefore, that where children are denied such challenges, they are among the group where the suicide rate is highest. Psychiatrist Mary Griffin reports that young adults in upper middle class and rich families account for the disastrous increase in the suicide rate today. “We can only conclude,” she says, “that we are raising children who have very fragile personalities, kids who can be devastated by the slightest setback” (Wall Street Journal, May 14, 1981).

More on this appears in an article, “Cries for Help, Adolescent Suicide,” by educator Mary Susan Miller. She reports that “among adolescents, suicide has increased more than 200 percent in recent years.” “In fact, it has risen so sharply that some call it epidemic.”* As to suicide attempts, she says, they outnumber successful suicides by as much as 50 to 1. One of several major causes, says the teacher, is that “parents strive to give their children happiness, not by a search for what is fulfilling, but by an avoidance of what presents difficulties. They eliminate boredom by crowding a year round schedule with activities . . . they eliminate effort by doing things for their children. Children grow up then, not only self-indulgent, but lacking in confidence. Their overprotective parents have instilled in them a feeling of ‘I can’t cope.’ Therefore, when trouble arises, they are ill-prepared to face it.” (Independent School, December 1977).

In contrast, the philosophy of reincarnation can inspire the conviction that we can endure anything. Surely, if we have had other lives, we may have gone through far worse trials than presently experienced, and here we are, still alive, still surviving, still going on with our evolution.

An Amazing Case of Endurance. The power to endure impossible situations is not the exclusive possession of special people, endowed with special gifts. The humblest person can live a heroic life, as this true story movingly illustrates. It is related by Dr. Ritchie in Return from Tomorrow.

While stationed in France during World War II, his medical unit was ordered to a concentration camp near Wuppertal, Germany. The war in Europe had just ended. “This was the most shattering experience I had yet had; I had been exposed many times by then to sudden death and injury, but to see the effects of slow starvation, to walk through those barracks where thousands of men had died a little bit at a time over a period of years, was a new kind of horror. For many it was an irreversible process: we lost scores each day in spite of all the medicine and food we could rush to them.” Ritchie was drawn to one Polish Jew who had obviously not been an inmate of the concentration camp very long. “His posture was erect, his eyes bright, his energy indefatigable. Since he was fluent in English, French, German and Russian, as well as Polish, he became a kind of unofficial camp translator. We came to him with all sorts of problems; the paper work alone was staggering in attempting to relocate people whose families, even whole hometowns, might have disappeared. ” But, though the Polish man “worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day, he showed no signs of weariness. While the rest of us were drooping with fatigue, he seemed to gain strength. ‘We have time for this old fellow,’ he’d say. ‘He’s been waiting to see us all day.’ His compassion for his fellow-prisoners glowed on his face, and it was to this glow that I came when my own spirits were low.” (11)

One day Ritchie was astounded to learn from the man’s papers that he had been in Wuppertal since 1939! “For six years he had lived on the same starvation diet, slept in the same airless and disease-ridden barracks as everyone else, yet without the least physical or mental deterioration.” During that period many inmates had taken their lives; it was a daily occurrence.

Here is the man’s story. “We lived in the Jewish section of Warsaw, my wife, our two daughters, and our three little boys. When the Germans reached our street they lined everyone against a wall and opened up with machine guns. I begged to be allowed to die with my family, but because I spoke German they put me in a work group. I had to decide right then whether to let myself hate the soldiers who had done this. It was an easy decision, really. I was a lawyer. In my practice I had seen too often what hate could do to people’s minds and bodies. Hate had just killed the six people who mattered most to me in the world. I decided then that I would spend the rest of my life loving every person I came in contact with.”

In contrast to this man’s tragedy, how exceedingly small seem the troubles most of us endure each day. Yet we have the same powers to endure what he had. It was by forgetting himself and his problems, by learning to radiate love to everyone he met, that he was able to transcend intolerable conditions.

If, then, the suicidally minded person wants to escape life because “other people do not understand or love me; because they abuse me; because I am in bad health; because I am out of work” – all reasons offered in suicide notes – the cure may be in reversing the situation. “Now, that I have experienced how miserable a person can be, let me look around and help other people having similar problems.” Then there is little time to become morbid about one’s own fate. Also, something else happens, something quite wonderful – the person finds surging up from within the power to transform the lives of others as well as his own. And for the first time, in this life at least, true joy and happiness are known.

Notes:

* Figures indicate a greater increase in suicides among the young. According to USA Today (April 18, 1984): “The National Center for Health Statistics reports that suicides among 15 to 24-year- olds have more than quadrupled – from 1.239 in 1960 to 5,239 in 1980 – and the rate per 100,000 has jumped from 5.2 in 1960 to 12.3 in 1980. The actual number of suicides, experts believe, is at least double that. ‘We believe many single motorcar accidents, especially in the younger population, may indeed be suicides,’ says Dr. Susan Blumenthal, director of suicide research at the National Institute of Mental Health.”

1. Kenneth Ring, Life at Death (from p. 261).

2. Raymond Moody, Life After Life pp. 143-44.

3. Raymond Moody, Reflections on Life After Life pp. 43-49.

4. George G. Ritchie, Return From Tomorrow pp. 58-59.

5. Ring, op. cit., p. 118.

6. “Life After Death: The Growing Evidence.” McCalls, March 1981; also Reader’s Digest, August 1981

7. George Gallup, Jr., Adventures in Immortality pp- 141.

8. Richard Wagner Briefe an Hans von Bulow. Jena: 1916, p. 107.

9. Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesen- donck Lagebuchblatter und Briefe 1853- 1871. Leipzig: 1922, p. 285 (letter 106a).

10. Leo Tolstoy, Diary of Leo Nickolaevich Tolstoy.

11. Ritchie. Return From Tomorrow, pp. 114-16.

The excerpt above was previously published in Theosophical Digest 1999 v11 i3 p43.