*sigh* Well, dammit, it's my blog, and I'm not censoring it. The truth is that even having failed, I haven't stopped thinking about suicide. I go to sleep thinking about it and wanting to do it, I wake up thinking about it and wanting to do it.

Throughout the day, my feelings and my strength either way waxes and wanes, even as I slog through my professed commitment to leave San Francisco to figure out what I'm going to do next with my life. When I say strength, it is both strength to do it and strength to not do it.

By extension, I guess there's a weakness component to doing it or not doing it. "Running away" isn't a part of it, although I do recognize an element of "not having to deal with 'it' anymore" (certainly not the way I've been managing it thus far, oy). But I know or believe suicide is not getting away from anything. It's not extinction, not an end.

If anything, it's a doorway through which my journey continues. But whereas the killing of life, any life, has negative karmic consequences generally speaking, I have a gut feeling there will be little if any to my "killing" myself; it's not killing my self. It's not a killing at all.

I don't view it as a "killing", per se; the destruction of a sentient life. How am I qualified to make that judgment? I'm not sure. I couldn't make it about anything else, i.e., killing even a bug is still to be avoided because I don't know anything about that living being or its karmic history.

Maybe that's it. My understanding of that other being is limited so that killing it would be destruction of life. But my understanding or belief in my own being precludes its destruction. I view it is a passage or transformation.

Killing a bug might also be passage or transformation, but I don't have an intimate connection with the bug to have a sense of all other karmic or relational factors or consequences. For example, change that bug to a human being, and it's more clear how that killing would have widespread consequences that would impact karmically. But it's still the same with a bug.

I'm not just saying that the intimacy of my connection with myself justifies suicide, because we all have that intimacy. It's also in conception. If someone commits suicide with the conception that this is killing their/this life, if someone attaches to the notion of this life so strongly that it can be killed, that might have karmic repercussions; if they believe in that sort of thing.

Having nominal Buddhist leanings, I think it's worth pointing out that Buddhism doesn't necessarily condemn suicide, because a blanket condemnation of suicide suggests an attachment to life and living, contrary to the belief and understanding that life and living is impermanent and ephemeral and should not be attached to.

Buddhism also does not condone suicide in my reading of it, because if it is understood as a "killing", the karmic repercussions might very well be negative. As normative understanding of suicide is a killing of the self, it should be discouraged. As negative karmic repercussions are to be avoided in general, suicide should be avoided.

I'm going out on a limb to state that I believe my understanding and spiritual aptitude places me in a position along my path that recognizes that I can't "kill" myself, and doing this thing that normative thinking calls "suicide" is not killing myself. Rather it would be an exhibition of one form of non-attachment. Not attaching to the appearance of this being, this identity, this self.

This is not an across-the-board thing, as Buddhism also warns against attachment to non-attachment. In another lifetime, in another life conception, the suicide as non-attachment equation won't work if it there is an attachment to the idea that suicide equals non-attachment.

I don't think I'm attached to suicide. It's a compulsion, an instinct, a directive, but it's not an attachment, as I've survived this long and continuing with this life isn't exactly unattractive. By living, it can be said that I'm attached to life and living, but I don't think that either. If I had a compulsion to live, I'd have no problem with it and hope it wasn't an attachment.