Anthony Bourdain
killed himself today. Fashion designer Kate Spade committed suicide earlier in the week. That's two prominent suicides in the span of just a few days. And they are far from alone, sadly. Suicide is a veritable epidemic across the nation. Suicide rates are
on the rise in almost every state. In some areas, they have risen by 30% or more. This is not normal. Something is happening. But what? And why?
People will say that suicide is on the rise because we are not doing enough to fight the "mental health crisis," but this can't be the cause. We have never been more aware of, or more proactive against, mental health issues, yet the suicide rate only continues to climb. The rate was a fraction of what it is today back when nobody had ever even heard of "mental health." The purely psychological explanations just don't hold up. Clearly there is a deeper problem here.
I think that problem is emptiness.
There is an emptiness at the core of our culture, and from this root the suicide epidemic grows. We have fled from God, from meaning, from purpose, and embraced a soft kind of nihilism; a nihilism that will not call itself nihilism. It uses other words and slogans to describe itself. "You only live once," it says. "Live your truth." People are told that there is only one life, one reality, and it has no meaning aside from what you assign to it. But what happens when you no longer see meaning?
Well, our culture says, if you do not see it then it is not there.Those who seek happiness by following the well-worn paths will inevitably fall into this pit. If you do what everyone else is doing, and live how they live, and walk in their footsteps, you will end up in the same darkness. You will begin to feel that there is no hope and no point and no real beauty or joy to be found in life. And this is the state in which so many of us are living.
A great, great many people in America are wallowing in this nihilistic despair and living hollow lives devoid of substance. They struggle and flail and reach out for help, but so often the hand that grabs hold of them will only drag them deeper into the pit.
We have seen this process play out this week. It's the same thing that happens every time a famous person commits suicide. We set out immediately to almost defend the act, and to ensure that nobody says anything negative about it. We insist that suicide is nothing but the result of a "mental illness." A depressed person dies of suicide in the same way that a person may die of breast cancer. We deliver tearful, admiring eulogies to the deceased celebrity and express our hope that they have "found peace."
And what good does any of this do? How are we helping a suicidal person by explicitly suggesting that suicide is a means to peace? How are we helping him by telling him that he has no choice, that his depression may just up and kill him one day, totally against his will? What service do we provide by telling him that he has no power, no alternative, no free will? And then we are shocked when the next person does it. And the next. And the next. And each time we react the same way, saying the same things, and we think that we are helping as long as we also pass out the suicide prevention hotline.
It is good to give out the suicide prevention hotline (1-800-273-8255). It is good to encourage people to get help, talk to someone, reach out. We get that part right. But we go dangerously off course with everything else. And the crisis only worsens because we refuse to trace it all the way down to its roots. We stop at the brain, at chemical reactions and psychological disorders, but we never pause to ask why all of our brains have apparently gone haywire in modern times.
If this is all just a matter of mental disorders, why in the hell are these "mental disorders" so common now?I think it is because the disorder is not purely psychological. It goes beyond our brains and into our souls, into the emptiness.
What everyone really craves deep in their bones is truth and meaning. Not meaning they arbitrarily assign, but meaning that is objective and inherent and beyond our ability to remove or change. But our culture tells us that nothing of the sort exists - there is only this physical world, and our egos, and whatever we decide to make of it all. And if we make nothing of it, and find nothing in it, then life is nothing and there is no reason to carry on living anymore.
If someone is feeling this way, yes, it is good to give them the numbers to call, and to tell them that they are not alone and people care for them, and to encourage them to talk to someone. I echo all of those exhortations. But it's not enough, in itself. People need more than that. They need more than therapy and phone numbers. They even need more than the knowledge that other people love them. They need
meaning. They need
hope. They need there to be a point to all of this, a reason.
Well, praise God because there is a reason, there is a point, there is a meaning. God is our foundation, our truth, our purpose, and the substance of our lives. We are not mere accidents.
We are not clumps of dust that grew randomly from the Earth and somehow developed consciousness and a moral code and the capacity for love. That doesn't make sense, and we all know it doesn't make sense, and we will literally kill ourselves trying to make sense of it.
There is a transcendent, spiritual character to humanity, and we all innately recognize it.
We find despair when we reject it and try to separate ourselves from it and from ourselves. Hope is found the other way, in the opposite direction. Hope is found when we embrace who we are, as children of God, and we keep our eyes and hearts focused on eternity, on home. God wants us there with Him. But not yet. There is still more to be done, more life to be lived, and we can live it in joy, knowing that there
is a meaning and a point to all of this.
Reader Comments
sounds like a plan dudette.
how do you suggest that we get started?
"Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord Keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."
We can's know what to do because our problems today are so vast and complicated. We just do not have God's vantage point to know what to do, when, and by whom. God does. JeSus showed us this by teaching us how to live this life. Besides loving our God, our brethren and even our enemies, we were taught to follow the will of Our Father in Heaven always. Knock, Ask and Seek the truth. God's vantage point is so much higher than ours, seeing Time as All One, into the hearts of men, and knowing the Reason of Things.
From the experiences Man gave us, we have seen where there are minds which can project thoughts into our own mind, and if we don't know ourselves, then we might accept them and the negative emotions, the Seven Deadly Sins, of fear, hate, shame, greed, lust, guilt and prejudice they can also project. The mind can play and replay over and over again anything which it knows will destroy what you feel about yourself, and it will also give you thoughts to commit suicide. Sometimes they project pain, and that pain can be so severe and last for a long time and colored in all kinds of emotions, and it will, like torture, cause you to do things you wouldn't normally do
Remember Robin Williams, who also committed suicide. He had voices in his mind, which meant he was probably dissimulated, where he was cut off from his conscience and God's counseling of him, probably from the use of drugs, either drugs of abuse or psychiatric drugs or even from fluoridated water as they calcifiy the Pineal, the Seat of the Soul, and they drove him to madness and suicide. We know as we have suffered similarly. Our only defense is to pray, "God's will be done." We identify the thoughts as not our own.
Humanity doesn't understand its true enemy because we can't see it. However, if we invite God into our lives and ask Him to show us, He will, in His own time, and according to His Will.
But the "objective" causes of effects aren't always so easily interpreted. Especially with "subjectivity."
If my house has a door that's rubbing against the "jam" the cause may be a loose hinge all the way to maybe a cracked foundation in my basement, which is a lot harder to fix than a few loose screws.
My father commuted suicide because his migraine headaches were too painful to bear and he couldn't find an effective treatment, but lots of ppl do it simply because they're depressed.
Why are they depressed? What does that feel like?
Remember:
We are Spiritual BEINGS having a human experience. We are NOT human being having a spiritual experience.
Part of the up-tick in depression may be because we don't remember who we are in the ultimate sense. And I'm sorry Teligion simply won't help you remember. Because Religion is mans view of God; where as, Spirituality is Gods view of man. A Spiritualist understands there is no one to blame for their experience. That everything is a choice and all choices cause effects, and what ever the choice, the effect it has on my experience has a benefit Spiritually.
Spiritually we are FREE and as such are free to CHOOSE any human experience of our own design which may include the experience of loss and feelings of emptiness.
Consider:
Some people claim that suicide is just plain wrong and maybe once I used to "believe" that myself. Until I chose to look at things differently, thus altering my experience.
My experience "became" different. Perhaps it all depends upon ones point of view.
I was 10 years old when my father took his own life; which, at the time, was very traumatic, but eventually I came to see the experience as something that made me a much stronger person. And today I cherish his sacrifice, feeling over come with gratitude on many occasions.
Let me explain.
In my case my father suffered tremendously. He had debilitating arthritis and some kind of cancer that appeared as blood in the toilet everyday, but the thing that put him over the edge was migraine head-aches.
I have many, many stories of people who sat up all night with him while he held his head between his legs, shaking with pain that no amount of drugs, consoling, or booze could alleviate.
He tried every remedy known to modern man to deal with the pain, including having two screws drilled into his head; in order to pull his skull apart in an effort to relieve the pressure.
I remember asking my mother why he did it, but when I was 10 I didn't know about all his aches and pains.; my father never complained about any of them.
Selfishly my whole family wished he would have chosen to live, but my Mom, years later, told me that my father felt he was already a burden to his family and couldn't bare the thought of us watching him slowly deteriorate, being bed ridden and wiping his ass for him, not to mention all the expense.
I feel it would have been selfish of us to expect him to suffer with such pain, just to have him with us. I don't think anyone should be guilted into that level of suffering, just to appease and postpone the emotional turmoil that a death in the family creates.
He had had enough and decided to let go. Instead of trying to hold his breath, he let it out and took another one in a less physical form.
Eventually we all have to deal with this kind of emotion, unless we die before everyone we know. This kind of experience is very difficult, but it's hard to learn a lesson when everything is always "peaches & cream." We all need reference points in order to differentiate one experience from another. How can I know what joy is without also experiencing pain in reference?
Think of it this way.
Perhaps my father and I made an agreement before we came here. I told him I wanted to have an experience of living through this kind of trauma and asked him if he would help.
Maybe he knew of other souls who also needed the experience for their soul development and we all gathered together and decided to become a family.
Maybe at some level we all created a plan together, so that each of us could come here and help one another learn lessons about sacrifice, trust, sorrow; physical, emotional, mental and Spiritual pain, etc.
We all wanted to learn about how to support one another though this type of experience and remember to love one another and also at some deep level learn the difference between being selfish and selfless. And it was my fathers choice to play his role in the way he did in order to help the rest of us with what we needed.
In this regard I feel my father made a huge sacrifice. And often wonder how much courage and strength he had to live so long with so much pain, living through it all, going to work everyday so his family had a roof over their head and food in there belly.
My father has been gone physically for 37 years, but all the lessons he gave me, which are numerous, have given me much pride and every time I express those lessons in my life I feel him by my side, watching over me like Obi Wan Kenobi did for Luke Skywalker.
My father helped me have a very difficult and emotionally painful experience here. I know I wanted to have such an experience because I know in my heart such experience allow my soul to grow, tempering it, making me stronger; emotionally, mentally, physically, but most importantly, Spiritually.
I also think it may be difficult for many to see things from this particular point of view, but without pain....there is no joy and the more pain I can endure, the more joy and gratitude I'm able to express and allow.
This has been my experience anyway.
In one sense, the cause of suicide is always the same: unbearable pain and hopelessness. The cause of the pain and hopelessness may vary. However, I think we all know deep down that the recent large increase in suicides is due to emotional disconnection, not from "God" but from each other.
True spirituality arises from within and has nothing to do with belief systems or scripture. The awareness that one is a spiritual being, simply is, and cannot be denied. When one has that awareness, religion is unnecessary; without it, religion is worse than useless. At best it is coping mechanism, but so are SSRIs, alcohol and addictions of all kinds. Coping mechanisms are not the same as solutions.
But if I was to reason that God is separate from me and created this world....seeing things as "wrong" would indicate that God is fallible, which would leave no where to turn.
the recent large increase in suicides is due to emotional disconnection, not from "God" but from each other.
.... not from god but from each other???? i thought each other is god.
Boredom...
But the active solution is to create Beauty, individually and a s society.
Mr Walsh asserts there is an epidemic of suicide in the world. Aside from the fact that the conflation of these two words are a non-sequitur (epidemic=>physical contagion), upon what factual investigation does this POV derive? Is there really an epidemic? I'm a boomer, born when radios were still large pieces of livingroom furniture and we used rotary dial, two-party line telephones. The rate of increase in world population took off about that time and only began a long decline nearly forty years later. Notwithstanding, the world population has doubled nearly twice since then. So where is the data that shows that world suicide rates (or just that of America compared to its population increase) are increasing faster than population increase?
What is known is that world-wide communication went from telegraph in my grandfather's day to radio and television in my father's day, to instant personal, point-to-point communication virtually anywhere on the planet in my own. We learn of events now that never made the news in their day, especially those events that are local and hardly of significance (like how many people were killed last year by lightning in India). Is the "uptick" in suicide a mirage produced by rapid and vapid communication, or what?
I don't accept Mr. Walsh's assertion about an epidemic. Mr Walsh wrote this because he is afraid he may lose Hope. At the very heart, this is what bothers people like Mr Walsh and Val Kilmer. I have nothing but empathy for people like Robin Williams and Jerry Doyle, whom I never have met.
As for a belief in God and the utility of religion (especially as a hedge against nihilism and hopelessness), I can only speak from my own experience, which seems to align at a fundamental level with a great many others. I was born and raised in a religious cult. I found my way out of it after 45+ years of study when I was 57. (The present leader of it is a first cousin and a very confused man.) It was the culmination of searching for answers to specific questions that are not new, having been asked by philosophers and sages for millennia, and purported to have been answered by priests and prophets into the dim past of recorded history. I cite here an excerpt from my philosophical musings I started recording at age 52, now at 213 pages:
"At age four I asked myself, who is God, that He would claim to love His children but abuse, excoriate, and destroy them for disobedience and iniquity? At age six, I asked myself, Who is God that He has no name yet does His Son, and requires all my conversation with Him to be transmitted through His Agent, as if God had no power to hear it for Himself? And that at the end of all this I had power to persuade Him to heed my puny desires?" According to Christian doctrine, God knows our desires before we petition Him for assistance. So what is the point of petition? What is the point of worshiping a person with no Name, no Face, and appears to be indifferent at a personal level (unlike our own parents) to the human condition?
At age 57, failing in my search to find evidence of divinity at the core of the major religious institutions (my personal digital library exceeds 150,000 pages, and the stack of books read exceed my height twice over, including the Bible and other religious tomes), I asked myself this simple question: Was Jesus serious when he proclaimed the parable of the good & bad fruit? Really? If it is really true that good fruit cannot come of a bad tree, nor can a good tree produce bad fruit, then the entire edifice of religion implodes upon itself, for there is not one of them that is devoid of bad, though well-meaning leadership, yet sufficient to abandon them, their personal weakness and fallibility notwithstanding. If the point of life is to have abundant joy in living, from an institutional POV, none of their leaders have made the grade themselves, and fit into the category of another of the parables of Jesus. X(
At age 42, probably the midpoint of my life from all apprehension at this juncture, I had an OBE. It was completely unexpected, and only at the very deepest level did it have any relevance to what was going on in my life at the time. For the second time, I was afforded the experience of ineffable love. My deceased parents were at the center of its initiation. I gained answers to questions (philosophical and existential) that had been unresolved for many years. Its substance was unlike any other I have read about. In time, I discovered the IANDS website and never found one account that matched mine in depth, intensity, and significance. I mention this because I have been on the lookout to learn if someone else had a similar experience. While there were many similarities to that of others (I discussed mine personally with Betty Eadie among a few), none of them treated issues that had plagued me since the death of my mother at age 12. It is a colossal understatement to say that the experience changed my life. Nevertheless, from what I learned while in that other Realm, it still took another 15 years to purge the cult thinking and see religion for what it is.
I have been at Death's door numerous times in life. In the more serious events, looking back I am convinced there was Outside Intervention. During the OBE it was revealed why I survived them, but that knowledge was restricted for good reason upon returning, so today I cannot say why I have, only that there was good Reason. Other times I have wished that I had perished in one of them, so excruciatingly painful were some experiences since then. This much I can say about suicide--it is not just about feeling trapped, with no other exit but death. Underneath that is the loss, or lack, of Faith in ourselves. To be more explicit: It has nothing to do with Faith in a Supreme Being. It is a lack of Faith in ourselves. America's one and only hobo philosopher (who died alone in a cheap Bay area apartment) Eric Hoffer, wrote at length about Faith, and self-confidence, and the many substitutes we use when we cannot realize the genuine article. His own insights into the human condition made it possible for me to finally break free of that ridiculous cult and its hypocritical and delusional behavior.
There is far too much judgementalism, too much denigration, too much high expectation, too much lust for vengeance, retribution, and vindication in this world, and too few willing to impart empathy. On this I am not just referring to the empathy of females born of hormonal impetus. An old man in today's world cannot smile and play with a wonderful little child, the two who do not know each other, for fear of being suspected as a pedophile. For that matter, an adult man at any age. A man cannot express natural affection out of compassion or concern toward a woman he does not know, for fear of being accused of sexual harassment. Only in times of crisis does society condone such behavior. And we pay the price for such isolationism in reduced empathy and friendship--the heart of developing Faith in ourselves and Hope in our future and ultimate redemption.
I appreciate your heartfelt read.
As it is said, "Life is not a walk in the park. Life is a walk in the heart of god" (whatever god signifies to each)
It is a lack of Faith in ourselves.
Faith is god in ourselves
(Speaking for my self.... god is the heartbeat of nature, or life, or nature of life, herself.)
mid-13c., faith, feith, fei, fai "faithfulness to a trust or promise; loyalty to a person; honesty, truthfulness," from Anglo-French and Old French feid, foi "faith, belief, trust, confidence; pledge" (11c.), from Latin fides "trust, faith, confidence, reliance, credence, belief," from root of fidere "to trust,"from PIE root *bheidh- "to trust, confide, persuade." For sense evolution, see belief. Accommodated to other English
abstract nouns in -th (truth, health, etc.).
And faith is neither the submission of the reason, nor is it the acceptance, simply and absolutely upon testimony, of what reason cannot reach. Faith is: the being able to cleave to a power of goodness appealing to our higher and real self, not to our lower and apparent self. [Matthew Arnold, "Literature & Dogma," 1873]
Blessings Klokman
And yet 9/11 hangs over us, 'justifying' the 'heroics' of our 'war crime invaders' and CIA-paid 'war crime jihadi head choppers.'
NO ONE QUESTIONS THAT POINT IN PUBLIC. THOSE WHO DO (I've been known to, are, to an atypically open minded audience; such folks are being 'downers' or 'party poopers' (even if the most serious of subjects were being talked about.)
Before typical audiences, knee-jerk slander occurs and comes from those "whose hearts are secretly at one with the speaker."(Twain, "They Mysterious Stranger.")
R.C.
When someone is that down, the best thing for them is to hit the road; move somewhere else, try again. "Oh I can't afford it?" But you can 'afford suicide? It's cheap. It's also the coward's way out of this life. at least for most. (Dr. Assisted euthanasia is NOT suicide.) We put our beloved pets down when we know that they are not - and will not in the future be - able to enjoy life. Folks should have that right too.
RC
Karma s a bitch as they say.
How come we do not see such epidemic in Denmark or in the Czech Republic? They have even more atheists there. Same for Canada, Netherlands. Think about it!!