Well Vivie and Sevensleak,
I guess this subject of suicide has become a topic of concern in the PRC right now. Thanks to Sevensleak for opening the topic. I read about it on the net this
morning in The Guardian from the UK. The title is "Suicide Blights China's Young Adults." Subtitle, Survey Reveals Main Cause of Death of People Under 35. It
was written by Jonathan Watts in Xilin and picked up from your state media there.
I'm glad life is so vivid and delicious for you, dear Vivie. Of course for many
people life is more bitter. Partly it depends where you live and partly how you live and how your government treats you, I suppose. I wouldn't like to be acitizen of any colour living in Zimbabwe just now where life seems to be totally
upset.
Sevensleak, I think that you and I agree on a number of points.
Suicide is not the answer. There are many reasons to avoid committingsuicide as Sevensleak wrote. One is because you have no idea how your life will
change in the future. Life is truly astonishing. You can't imagine what is in
store for you and you would be very surprised if somebody told you. You would never believe them.
If you are willing, then pray to God and ask for meaning in your life and help with it, so that you can be a blessing in your family, country and the world and
be really happy, yourself.
No one should leave this life by their own hand. They need to wait until their
time comes. If they don't they will arrive in the next world before their time.
It would be like going to a party and finding that you weren't invited. "There is a time to be born and a time to die...." as the poet said. Some people die by their own hand because they are so desperate and unhappy that they lose their reason and there is forgiveness from God in such cases, say Baha'i Holy Writings. None of us are in any position to judge those whose despair overcomes them
.
Once I heard the question asked of a very wise person: "If the next life is so much more expansive than this one, as different as this second world is to life in the first world of our mother's womb, why don't people just hasten themselves
along?" The woman replied that our eternal selves, our minds/hearts, which are
the continuing experiencers of life here and forever, are like roses. A rose is
only beautiful if it opens naturally. If a rose is forced open too soon by plucking the petals open it will be damaged. Think of yourself as a rose-bud with
its petals plucked open and you won't want to allow your thoughts to go any further in that dark direction. You wouldn't want to damage your inner being like that so suicide becomes out of the question.
I'm a happy woman. I have a husband to whom I've been married for almost fiftyyears and whom I love deeply, as he loves me. We have our four excellent children and eight grandchildren. All are good. Our home is comfortable and I love it
, our garden, and our view. I have many friends here and I have you as my friends, too. I have so much, and have been so richly blessed and I think I even know now at this age when I have gained perspective of my life why I was sick for so many years and have had to spend so much time in bed. I think it is so that I
could read widely and continue to educate myself throughout life, from my earliest years until now. What if I had despaired and cut all that off?
I have come to believe that eventually everything in life makes a pattern that is for wider reasons and purposes than we are able to know fully, until we find out the whole meaning of what we have created from our lives, in the next life.
Imagine the effects of our deeds, down through the ages. You can't possibly know all the myriads of ramifications down through the ages of deeds done here and
now.
I think this knowledge must be partly what makes a heaven for some and a hell for others such as mass murders. Imagine all the lives they have blighted and all
the excellent future outcomes they cut off by murdering. I wouldn't want to have that hanging around my neck as my possession in the next life! To know everything that might have been....
I believe we can't take anything with us except our minds and hearts, our memories and relationships with loved ones here, and the good we have done. That must
be why a few who have nothing much good inside of themselves to take with them
can be metaphorically spoken of as being there like stones. Stones have existence. They have presence, but they can't do much else, unless somehow from outside themselves they are changed so that they can do something else. In this world
we have free will to make choices about what we do. In the next world we don't
have free will. Our progress can only come through the mercy of God. Sometimes the prayers of others can help to bring that mercy. That's makes the metaphor
of stones meaningful. Stones can't grow as the vegetable world does. They can't
move about as the animal world does and understand this world they see before them. They can't understand which they have never seen or experienced as the human world can. Humans are the sum of all previous creation. They contain all the worlds before them: mineral, vegetable, animal, and they have that marvellous
extra which I have mentioned in the previous sentence. So unless things act upon stones they don't have any power of themselves. Stones have sunk back to their lowest level without any good to take with them.
So don't forget that you are a beautiful rose bud that must open naturally to be
a full, blooming and marvellous rose. If you ever feel despondent and overwhelmed, hold on to life anyway, and try to find help to carry on until things eventually change. Your government recognizes now the problems that exist, and help
will begin to appear for any of you who need it.
The wheel continually turns. Who should know this better than you, whose lives
are presently seeing such change. The wheel is turning steadily towards a better life for all of you in China. Extreme change is one of the reasons some there
are feeling distressed and overwhelmed. Things are becoming better. Be there.
:-)
Love, Mary
