Searching for God # 49

If ‘medicalizing’ suicide, for the psychiatric profession, and declaring abortion and suicide, and murder both evil and criminal, in many if not most jurisdictions, by both church and state is the current reality, how is it even within the realm of conscious, moderate, curious and exploratory questions to consider suicide a legitimate human decision?

We might begin with a look at some of Hillman’s penetrating and highly challenging thoughts, observations and insights.

Searching for proof and demonstration of immortality is muddled thinking, because proof and demonstration are categories of science and logic. The mind uses these categories and the mind is convinced by proof. That is why the mind can be replaced by machines and the soul is not. Soul is not mind and has other categories for dealing with its problem of immortality. For the soul, the equivalents of proof and demonstration are belief and meaning. They are as difficult to develop and make clear, as hard to wrestle with, as is proof. Out of these experiences, not out of dogma or logic or empirical evidence, the positions of faith are built. And the fact alone that the psyche has this faculty of belief, unaffected by proof or demonstration, presses us toward the possibility of psychic immortality. Psychic immortality means neither resurrection of the flesh nor personal afterlife. The former refers to immortality of the body, the latter to immortality of the mind Our concern is with immortality of the soul……

What is immortality and reincarnation of the soul in psychology is conservation and transformation of energy in physics. The mind’s certainty that energy is ‘eternal’ is given by the law in physics. This corresponds with the soul’s conviction that it is immortal, and the sense of immortality is the inner feeling of the certainty of psychic energy. For if the psyche is an energetic phenomenon, then it is indestructible.(James Hillman, Suicide and the Soul, pps. 54-55)

Do these words even belong in a piece focused on the search for the divine?

Are they such an abomination as to be rendered ‘out of bounds’ for the theological pursuit of belief and meaning? Perhaps not.

Immortality, an afterlife, for the soul, is an image that lies at the heart of the Christian theology. Different mind and soul, with the former reliant on proof and demonstration, while the soul is reliant on meaning and belief, seems congruent with the notion that our psychic energy is both a bridge and a ‘current’ that flows between psychology and religion. At the centre of much of the writing of Christian theology is the notion of ‘transformation.’ Even the Greek word metanoia (from Oxford Dictionary, change in one’s way of life resulting from penitence or spiritual conversion, a change of mind, reorientation, a fundamental transformation of outlook, of one’s vision of the world and of oneself, a new way of loving others and God.) is pointing to, and evocative of, a substantial transformation. Whether that transformation is or even can be exclusively ‘religious’ or exclusively ‘psychological’ is outside my pay grade. From this perspective, it does not seem beyond legitimacy to suggest, however tentatively, there could well be an overlap.

If the soul’s search is for meaning and belief, and one’s meaning, purpose and belief, however that last word is defined, it seems at least coherent to consider, with respect, some kind of relationship between psychology and faith, especially around the issue of immortality and death.

Some additional thoughts from Hillman:

‘death appears in order to make way for transformation,’ (from analysands). The flower withers around its swelling pod, the snake sheds its skin, and the adult puts off his childish ways. The creative force kills as it produces the new. Every turmoil and disorder called neurosis can be seen as a life and death struggle in which the players are masked. What is called death by the neurotic mainly because it is dark and unknown is a new life trying to break through into consciousness; what he calls life because it is familiar is but a dying pattern he tries to keep alive. The death experience breaks down the old order, and in so far as analysis is a prolonged ‘nervous breakdown’  (synthesizing as it goes along) analysis means dying. ….Without a dying to the world of the old order, there is no place for renewal, because…..it is illusory to hope that growth is but an additive process requiring neither sacrifice nor death. The soul favors the death experience to usher in change. Viewed this way, a suicide impulse is a transformation drive. It says: ‘Life as it presents itself must change. Something must give way,. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow is a tale told by an idiot. The pattern must come to a complete stop. But since I can do nothing about life out there, having tried every twist and turn, I shall put an end to it here, in my own body, that part of the objective world over which I still have power. I put an end to myself.  (Hillman, op.cit. pps. 55-56)

In a secular culture in which the denial of death is a prominent, sustained and even preferred way to ‘not consider’ death, we continue to turn our eyes, our ears and our mind and hearts away from what is considered, in some Christian ecclesial institutions, a sign of evil, being the absolute inverse of ‘life’. If life is sacred, then does it not follow that death is evil? Well, what if both absolutes were a conjoined, Siamese twin of theology, and were not necessarily indigenous to the thought, mind, hope and love of God?

It is the notion that God’s will for man can be encapsulated in a series of absolute concepts, notions, beliefs and rituals, even if considered metaphorically, and not merely literally, to which I am attempting to question.

Most arguments against suicide, whether medically assisted or not, focus on the sin. We might wish to consider acknowledging that in our conventional cultural perspective, even the term ‘mental health’ implies a ‘mental illness’ ironically and paradoxically. What is not considered is the raw, detailed, unexpurgated, undiluted experience of the person contemplating ending his or her own life. And, it is the  prospect of actually  listening to that person, at the ‘in extremis’ moment that this piece would like to focus.

Agape love, identifying with the person in whatever distress might be enacting itself out in a person’s life, is valued quite highly among Christians. It is even modelled as an emulation (or imitation) of God’s love for humanity. And here I am unabashedly borrowing from Hillman’s two ideas; one, that to listen without judgement, without being distracted, without even a facial or a breath that could be interpreted as ‘signaling’ an opinion, one way or another, when being present with a person actively contemplating suicide, is essential. We all come to most significant moments from a perspective that segregates those moments into ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Our moral judgement intervenes, whether consciously or not, in the moment. The task of emptying that ‘per-conception’ of ‘good and evil’ in order for the person to ‘listen’ and to ‘hear’ the specific words of how s/he sees himself in the world, and how s/he sees the world seeing himself or herself is, or at least can be imagined as an intense, extreme and highly demanding expectation of being present. Not to rescue, not to prevent, not to dissuade, not to argue, not to demean any of the observations, perceptions, attitudes and beliefs of the other person, but to be fully present….as another human being.

Secondly, the ‘listening’ person, need not be a trained, clinically certified professional, given that for Hillman the ‘raw’ experience contains the seeds of very deep and imaginative perspective and potential understanding of what might be playing out in the ‘subject’s life, and if that ‘narrative’ can be analogized as parallel to a god, goddess, myth or archetype of which the ‘subject’ may be totally unaware, then this new ‘perception’ and ‘understanding’ of the moment might serve as a ‘lightbulb’ of awareness, an ‘aha’ moment.

The notion of confronting suicide exclusively from a preventive modality and mentality, inescapably and indisputably either walks over or denies the ‘fine print’ of the subject’s experience, given that it starts with a no-no absolute position.

If we as Christians worship a God of omniscience, and if as Rumi reminds us that God sees us from the inside:

When you look for God, God is in  the look of your eyes,

In the thought of looking,

Nearer to you than yourself,

Or things that have happened to you

There is no need to go outside.

If we are ever to open the door to the darkest and most dire experiences of our lives to both God and to ourselves, what moment could there be that could be more congruent with self-emptying that that moment when one comes to the point of actively contemplating the termination of one’s life.

It is in our conscious, deliberate and even disciplined denial of ‘darkness’ including death as evil, as individuals and certainly as churches purporting to represent, emulate, worship and imitate God, in and for all of his love and glory, that our ‘absoluteness’ of the evil of suicide lies beholden to. As Jung reminds us, if our religion is focused on salvation, we will have a mind-set and attitude of fear; if our religion is focused on mystery, we will have a mind-set and attitude of wonder. Is God not more than intimate with the depths of human darkness, both literally and imaginatively? And can our search for God even begin without the legitimate option of opening that vault, even if such a moment has brought us to active contemplation of ‘ending it’?

Can we begin to consider bringing suicide out of the closet of our legitimate search for God, not only for ourselves but for others who, themselves might well and sincerely, sensitively and even perhaps blindly and naively, be contemplating suicide? And as an integral beginning of that answer, can we at least begin to imagine being fully present, without judgement, without anxiety, without interfering, and attempting to attain a neutrality, in order for the subject’s voice, the inner voice, to be given sound and vibration.

In such a moment, neither person participating, can not be transformed, irrespective of what the physical outcome is.