Suicide and Reincarnation

Suicide and Reincarnation

James G Matlock

There are many ideas about the spiritual consequences of suicide and how it might affect reincarnation. This article examines twelve verified past-life memory cases that provide a scientific basis for understanding the implications of self-killing, half of them investigated by Ian Stevenson, the rest by other researchers. These verified cases suggest that following suicide, the intermission between lives is unusually short and that the return often is to a relative or friend. As in other reincarnation cases, personality and behavioural traits carry over from life to life.

Twenty-five of these cases involved people who had intentionally taken their own lives, in two cases to avoid capture by police or soldiers, in the rest ‘when a social situation, such as a bankruptcy or thwarted love affair, seemed to them worse than death’. Stevenson remarked that these cases disprove the notion that suicide necessarily results in consignment to Hell for eternity. However, the cases do not suggest that suicide is a good way to extricate oneself from one’s troubles; it only changes ‘the location of their occurrence’.1

However I'd argue against this:

Reincarnation researcher James Matlock observes that the short intermissions and returns among family and friends suggest that self-killing conveys considerable control over the reincarnation process, perhaps because the death is premediated. Although cases of violent death have statistically shorter intermissions than cases of natural death, the intermissions in suicide cases are especially brief.8 These findings are robust cross-culturally and have been confirmed by solved suicide cases that have come to light since Matlock first recognized the patterns.9

If anything this seems more like a constraint, where a soul is unable to escape its previous life's bounds due to the suicide.

This also aligns with some other remarks on suicide by Fred Wolf, where the souls of suicides end up lost and possibly the equivalent of "hungry ghosts" bound by their need for life force.

Something that I've observed in the past is that many of the cases where the intermission period is short, are where a life has been cut unexpectedly short in any way. Suicide would be among that group, other examples might include accidents or being a victim of a crime and so on.

I'm not sure though to what extent a dramatic or traumatic end might in itself be more memorable, in the sense that a childhood recall of a past life might be more likely where there was something stressful or traumatic. That would be a separate issue.

I sympathise with the perspective that suicide could mean more of a constraint, rather than gaining control over ones path. There are also NDE accounts from attempted suicide, where the person survives to tell the tale. It seems in general that a repeated attempt is less likely after an NDE, because of the additional knowledge and broader view of the overall picture. One of the things from NDEs might be the idea that, if the suicide had ended the life, then a very similar version of the same challenge would be reached again, with the added burden of having to live through all the circumstances leading up to that critical point all over again in that next life.

Though I'd also add that in my opinion, not all so-called suicides are the same, some may be merely a variation of the way things would have played out naturally. Particularly in the present day where modern medical practice can sway things in the opposite direction, unnaturally prolonging things sometimes .

One of the reasons my unincarnated friends gave for why I shouldn't commit suicide in this life was that the mindset I'd likely need to be in in order to do it might make me more likely to come back here. I'd likely have regrets and other things that could make me unconsciously not wan to leave. Thus I might not pop out "high" enough or for long enough for them to grab, as they claim to be living beyond what might commonly be called "the veil", the general area where poltergeist-capable spirits tend to reside. The extra jump makes it far more difficult for them to interact here for a variety of reasons. How valid those reasons are, or how true they all are is a matter of debate. 

Thus if my goal was to get out and stay out, suicide was probably the worst thing I could do in my condition. That being said, I do think that there can be a lot of utility to suicide in certain environments. the problem being that, if you're just trying to escape a bad world chances are you're not going to and instead your refusal to try and fix things would contribute to every successive life getting worse and worse as things get more advanced. Magic can of course change this, but if you don't have that, or any knowledge of how to develop it, escape is a crapshoot. Maybe you'll shift to another reality, maybe you'll shift to another body forward in time like "normal", etc, you don't really know. Nor would you know if it would be better or worse. So unless your situation is incredibly bad it's probably not a good idea.

I have used suicide in a few situations in "the past" but from what I remember none of these cases allowed me to outright escape the world/reality/dimension I was in at the time. The main case was being stranded in a frozen tundra with a broken leg, a few other injuries, and no supplies. Me and the other person I was with had no real choice but to inject ourselves into the local soul cycle or whatever you wanna call it and live out a bunch of lives until things got advanced enough in the societies we were in that we could both remember everything and redevelop enough magic to leave. Took a really long time and wasn't all that fun from what I remember. Kinda one of the bigger inspirations for why I wanted to get magic so bad in this life.

It's an interesting question - who or what exactly ensures that suicides have this kind of gravity? Is it a natural occurrence as some Buddhists might attest, a result of "karma" simply being the consequence of action?

Or is it more top-down, some deities or at least spirits who've set things up this way to "teach"/"bind" us?

It's an interesting question - who or what exactly ensures that suicides have this kind of gravity? Is it a natural occurrence as some Buddhists might attest, a result of "karma" simply being the consequence of action?

Or is it more top-down, some deities or at least spirits who've set things up this way to "teach"/"bind" us?

Well if my attempts to rebuild the physics I remember is correct then it's just a lowest energy state thing. Souls drift towards whatever they are most compatible with which typically means whatever they are most familiar with. Supposedly everything else does this too right down to subatomic particles. So it doesn't just affect suicide reincarnations but all reincarnations as well as synchronicities both controlled and uncontrolled and so forth, That being said that didn't mean people with enough skill, knowledge, power etc with magic couldn't set something up to influence that process. Magic itself quite likely also works on this principle, or at least some versions probably would, given that although there are seemingly solid rules, those rules are ultimately based on nothing, and thus could be influenced and manipulated in various ways to get whatever effect you wanted, so long as that effect was compatible with the local physics around you. I mean, PK is arguably just a really powerful, concentrated synchronicity. Though I don't personally subscribe to that, it's not exactly wrong.

Apports and teleportation could be explained similarly. Point to any 3d space, and if it's possible for an object to exist in that space, even if it currently doesn't, things could be made compatible with that with enough "energy" to shift things so that that's the case. A lot of this makes more sense if you treat spacetime like an emergent, piecemeal thing arranged based on lowest energy states rather than a single, solid contiguous object like it is now.