TRANSCRIPT
I was recently having a conversation with someone who told me that he had read a book in which it argued that because of the way that humanity is destroying the planet, wreaking such destruction on nature, that the only way for a human being to be ethical in this modern world is to kill himself or herself. So, to commit suicide is the only way to be ethical in this modern world. And I so profoundly do not agree with that.
Interestingly, over time, especially on my video about why I think it’s a bad idea for people to have children, people have commented, I think maybe five, six, seven times over the past several years, “Oh, if you believe that, you should just kill yourself. That would be the best service you could do to humanity.” And they say it in sort of a snarky way.
However, this person who was telling me about this book said the author argued it in an actually serious way. So, I want to reply to it once and for all: Why do I think it’s a terrible idea to commit suicide? Why do I think committing suicide is not an ethical thing in this modern world?
Now, I can understand in part the argument that if there’s one less human, that’s one less person eating plants, eating animals, living in space, the space of our planet, using water, using other resources, electricity. So, I can’t understand the argument of removing a human actually could have some positive effect. But to me, that doesn’t at all negate the horrible side of what happens when someone does commit suicide. And that’s why I think it’s never ethical to commit suicide.
Suicide causes trauma, and all the people who know the person, or maybe not everybody, but people who are close to that person—suicide is a devastating thing. I’ve actually had friends commit suicide. One of my parents at one point when I was younger just threatened to commit suicide, and that in and of itself was horrible for me. I remember having bad dreams about it for a long time. It’s an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness, of helplessness, sometimes guilt. It really does create a ripple effect of trauma, and that’s why I would never argue that it’s an ethical thing, especially for the sake of healing the world, of making the world a better place for people to kill themselves.
So, what is the ethical thing to do to help heal this world, this pain-troubled, confused world? This world in which humanity is over-exploiting resources, over-exploiting each other. Parents so often are exploiting their children. We’re eating ourselves out of house and home. People, you can even say that we’re like a cancer or a virus spreading across the planet. And unfortunately, I’ve been to some places where it sure does seem that way. And I live in New York City. This county that I live in, of Manhattan, I think it’s the most densely packed county in the whole United States, one of the most densely packed places in the whole world. In some ways, it is like being in the center of living in the tumor of the cancer.
But what is the ethical thing to do living in this world? Well, I do think not having children—really, there’s some really good arguments why that’s ethical. Not creating a new life, it doesn’t cause trauma to not create a new life. To take away a life, that does cause trauma. So, that’s one thing: to not have children.
But I really think underneath it, whether someone even has children or not, the main thing is to heal our own individual traumas, to unblock our spirit, to let the truth of ourselves come out freely. The truth of what we weren’t allowed when we were children, especially in our family systems that didn’t totally allow us to be who we really are, or in some cases profoundly didn’t allow us to be who we really are. To heal these traumas, to grieve this, to me is what humanity is hinging upon—the health, the future of our humanity.
If individual people can grieve, that does the opposite of sending out a trauma into the world. The opposite of what happens when someone kills themselves. When people start to grieve, when an individual starts to heal his or her trauma, starts to become more real, starts to become more honest, starts to become more healthy, more integrated, more of a whole human being, a more caring person, a more altruistic person, a more empathic person—all these things being a consequence of healing historical traumas. When people become more of these things, when people become healthier, it spreads. A ripple happens; it affects everyone that is close to him or her.
Now, what I have seen also, I’ve seen this in my personal life and I’ve seen this with others, is not infrequently when people start to get healthier, when people start to work out their traumas, when people have more of their true spirit come out, when they become more honest, more loving, even sometimes the people around them can be threatened and can pull away. Healing has a lot of power; it can really frighten people. It can turn people off. People sometimes want to shield themselves from healing. But it doesn’t mean that they’re not still positively affected. They know it somehow. The energy ripples into people, and maybe it’ll take them five years or ten years or fifteen years or twenty years to be able to begin their own process of healing. But one person healing does spread; it affects everyone around them.
And I think in a strange way, these videos are my attempt at that also—to do it even on a bigger scale, to share my healing, the consequences of my healing, the thoughts, even some might say the wisdom that comes out of me having become more healed. I can share it here, and I think it does have a positive effect on the world.