Macro society's view of life and death.
Between Neda and myself we have recalled most of the details of that conversation. As we remember, it began one evening when I remarked about a student in our department who had just committed suicide. I said that suicide was a cop-out and Jon had replied with the following.
'You're complaining, Karl, about a conscious act of suicide which may or may not be an attempt to deny one's own responsibility for his present state of being. Aren't you forgetting that all micro existence is unconscious suicide? It may end swiftly as in a lethal accident, or it may be a slow process of micro aging which results in the long-term decay and deterioration of the body until some vital part fails completely. All of this deterioration is the natural result of resisting the responsibility and the consequences of one's own chosen life pattern. This resistance causes all the life stress that Dr. Hans Selye referred to in his book, The Stress of Life.'
'All right,' I said, 'I won't argue unconscious suicide or Dr. Selye's stress theory, but the student we're talking about committed conscious suicide since he left a note apologizing to his parents. Now I say that's a coward's way out.'
Jon gave me his big grin and said, 'According to that French sociologist we studied, Emile Durkheim, there are two types of suicide: anomic and altruistic. The first, anomic, is due to self-other alienation and is an attempt to escape from a life so overwhelming that the person perceives himself as being completely inadequate to cope with it. This is what I call conscious micro suicide. It is always unsatisfactory to the micro self because when the person wakes up in his astral body he finds that he's still stuck with a mind that believes it's not responsible, a mind filled with the kind of unforgiving self-loathing that the micro self experiences when faced with failure.'
At this point Neda interrupted asking, 'But, Jon, didn't you say that all actions are perfect from the Macro view? How can suicide be perfect?'
'At the Macro level,' he answered, 'every negative action is balanced by a positive action and, thus, they cancel each other, leaving perfect balance. From the Macro view one can see that every failure is a success in the long run because it leads to the insight necessary for learning. If a soul has to commit micro suicide, once or a thousand times, in order to learn that there is no escape from its own responsibility for its state of being, then that is necessary and perfect for that soul.'
'I see,' Neda said nodding her head. 'Then what is altruistic suicide?'
'A good example of that kind,' Jon explained, 'was demonstrated when the Titanic sank. Some of the people aboard went down with the ship rather than deprive someone else of a seat in the very limited number of lifeboats. History is filled with examples of altruistic suicide in which people consciously give up their lives so others can live or profit from their example.'
'Suicide as an example...,' Neda hesitated. 'Is that what the members of the Macro society are doing when they permit the Micro Islanders to kill them? Maybe they're trying to show by their example that physical life is not the ultimate goal.'
'That's part of it,' Jon responded. 'The most famous example of this was the suicide of one of the greatest Macro philosophers ever to be incarnated on this planet, Jesus of Nazareth. He permitted himself to be killed to demonstrate that the Macro self is the master of the microphysical self and that it can even recreate or resurrect a body that has been killed. I think he was also demonstrating his belief that physical existence, while necessary for micro man, is only one very limited perspective along the m-M continuum.'
'So the evolutionary goal,' Neda added, 'is to not get stuck forever at the micro-physical level, but to journey onward toward ever greater awareness until each soul returns to full awareness of its macrocosmic origin.'
'That's right,' Jon said, 'and that leads us to a third type of suicide that micro man is not yet aware of evolutionary suicide. What the Macro society calls evolation.'
'I think you've mentioned that before, Jon,' I said.
'Yes, you'll remember that when I was in the hospital trying to save lives I was thwarted by some of the patients whose subconscious minds had decided on death,' Jon said. 'Remember Bruno who told me that he had incarnated to balance his vibrations. Now that he had accomplished this purpose he was graduating from this life and evolving on to a new dimension. You may recall that our Deltar, Hugo, also planned to consciously terminate his physical existence-to evolate.
'No one dies until he is convinced at the Macro or sub-conscious level that he has learned all he can or all he wants to in that particular life. This applies just as much to the baffling problem of crib deaths as to deaths due to cataclysmic earthquakes or tidal waves.'
'Are you saying that the sub-conscious mind knows what will happen in the future and could avoid an accident if it so desired?' Neda asked.
'That's exactly what I'm saying,' Jon nodded enthusiastically. 'From the Macro point of view there are no accidents.'
'But getting back to evolutionary suicide,' I said, 'isn't that as big a cop-out as anomic suicide? If you've learned your lessons you'd ought to stick around and help those who haven't.'
'That's like saying that everyone should stay in first grade forever so they can help teach the lessons there,' Jon replied.
'But someone's got to teach them,' I protested.
'There has never, in the history of our universe, been a shortage of teachers-only of students willing to learn. As the Macro philosophers have said-when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Ask and you will receive is another way of stating this Macro truth. It reflects back to prepotent desire and predisposing belief. If you desire something more than learning or if you don't believe that you can learn, or that you deserve to learn, you'll have to wait until your desire and belief are greater before you succeed,' Jon explained.
'I still don't see how you could tell the difference between a cop-out suicide and evolutionary suicide,' I said, shaking my head.
'It's a question of motive, Karl,' Jon explained.
'Was the motivation for death to escape the past or to embrace the future? A cop-out suicide is escaping his past and/or present-an evolutionary suicide is embracing his future,'
'That's a hard one to handle,' I complained. 'Wouldn't a person tend to lie to himself about his desire to escape life?'
'Sure, that happens a lot,' Jon answered. 'In each life there are lessons that must be learned, but if you lie to yourself about having learned all there was to learn in first grade, then commit suicide, you wake up right back in first grade. You see, in this planetary schoolroom it's impossible to be a drop-out for very long. You can't run away from your own greater self.'
'Micro man views physical life on this planet as the final stage, rather than just a preparation for experiencing the next dimension. With that sort of philosophy he naturally tends to think that suicide would end it all. He becomes the victim of his own micro philosophy.'
'Then is suicide a sin or not?' Neda asked.
'It's hard to generalize about suicide, Neda, since all death is either conscious or unconscious suicide,' Jon replied thoughtfully. 'As for sin, there is only one sin, and that is to deny the perfection of our macrocosmic oneness with all that is, was, or ever will be. But even that is only a sin from the micro view. From the Macro view there can be no sin, for all is purposively and evolutionarily perfect. The key then, is to accept the perfection of what is by responding to everything with loving acceptance, thereby freeing yourself from the bonds of anxiety, fear, and condemnation which bind you to physical existence. Then, and only then, is evolation possible.'
'Ok. If I was Macro I'd know who was living by the rule of loving acceptance and who wasn't, and I'd know everyone's motive for ending their life. Then I'd be able to tell if it was suicide, as we popularly think of it, or evolation. The problem is, I'm not Macro!' I protested, 'So I still don't know how to tell the differences!'
'Remember that monograph we read back in Cultural Anthropology? The one on that Indian tribe whose old people, when they were ready to die, just said goodbye to everyone, went up on a hill, and died?' Jon asked.
'Yeah. Kind of like your Hugo's plan to...' I began.
'That's it exactly, Karl,' Jon interrupted. 'If you use anything to do the job with, you committed escapist suicide. If you wrapped up the details of your life then just laid down and died, that's evolation.'
That's as close as Neda and I could come to a total recall of that evening's conversation.
It was Jon's comments on evolation, combined with our dreams of him, that ultimately modified my view of Jon's death by broadening my perspective.
