The Big Question about Suicide
What happens in the afterlife to people who take their own life?
I have a special place in my heart for people who have lost loved ones to suicide. I’ll explain that more in a moment, but I’ll pre-empt this article by saying that suicide loss survivors (people who lost loved ones to suicide) will feel a sense of comfort and peace from reading what my investigation of life after death has revealed about this subject.
Losing a loved one to suicide takes on some extra baggage that other deaths don’t have. The reason behind this is that when a person takes their own life, many loved ones (family and friends) view it as a reflection of their relationship. Surviving family members, for example, often ask these questions: How could they do this to me? Why didn’t they come to me before making this choice? Did I miss the signs and could I have done something to prevent it?
Loved ones feel devastated in their grief, naturally, but they often feel betrayed in some ways (why would he punish me like this?), responsible in other ways (I must have overlooked her cries for help) and confused in every way (why didn’t I see this coming?).
These are questions that are rarely answered but also less relevant once you learn more about the mindset behind suicide (not the focus of this article, but I’ll address this briefly at the end). Yet there are questions that can be answered that are commonly asked in reference to life after death. Are there consequences in the afterlife due to suicide? Did he go to hell? Can she hear and see me, and does she know what I’m going through? Will I ever see him again? Is she okay now?
I created an Afterlife TV episode about this special circumstance about twenty years ago, which was the first or second most popular episode on that show every year for twenty years. Those statistics alone are an indication of the suffering that takes place after someone takes their own life. People are seeking answers—and comfort—in relation to their loss after a loved one takes his or her life. Well, this article offers the latest information I’ve discovered since that episode was created two decades ago.
The Big Picture
In the overall picture, people who take their own lives go to the spirit world like anyone else. And whatever was tormenting them that led them to take their own life is no longer a threat or issue. They are met with instant calm and peace. They are welcomed by loved ones who passed before them. And they are steeped in the unconditional love that every spirit bathes in upon returning to our true home.
This is not to say there aren’t consequences in the afterlife for taking your own life. You will feel the suffering you have caused your loved ones following the suicide. You will fully know the ripple effect of your final act of free will, ripples that cover close relationships, acquaintances, distant connections, and even people you never met who heard the news of your suicide and were affected in one way or another by it.
Because people in spirit can feel everything their surviving loved ones are feeling, you will intimately know what some loved ones feel as betrayal. You will understand why some loved ones may question if you really loved them at all. You will also realize the depth of some people’s sense of responsibility for your death, those who think, “I should have seen the signs.” In essence, you will have a front-row view of the myriad of emotions your family and friends go through in response to how you died.
As horrific as this may be, there’s a purpose for experiencing these ripple effects of your suicide. It’s how a spirit learns and grows from their human lifetime. In fact, this growth is the purpose of living a physical life. So, there is some built-in insulation from what your loved ones are going through. There’s no point in a spirit spiraling into the abyss of regret, shame, and self-reproach. The point of a spirit feeling what their loved ones are going through is about learning and growing, not suffering or punishment.
The Question of Hell
I covered this question in greater detail in my article on this subject, but I’ll give you the CliffsNotes version here. Despite some religious beliefs claiming that suicides go to hell, I’ve never uncovered any evidence that people who take their own lives go to any place that could be described as hell. In fact, I’ve found no evidence whatsoever that hell exists at all for anyone, regardless of their choices or actions here on earth.
Having said that, there are aftereffects from the action of taking one’s own life. Once a person who dies by suicide arrives in the afterlife, they will know instantly that their suicide was an act of free will, not a natural death. And because they, as spirits, are still connected to their human life, they might have regrets, but not in the way that you and I have regrets here on the physical plane.
Since souls have a human life to have experiences, their suicide is still an experience that teaches them something. Consequently, they will learn and evolve from the experience. And some of what they learn is what the consequences are for themselves and others for making this choice to take their own life.
Having said all this, the fact is that this answer cannot be properly explained without understanding the differences between the soul and the spirit, because the soul and the spirit have different responses to suicide. You can read more about the roles of the soul and the spirit in the article I posted on this subject.
Assuming you understand the difference between soul and spirit, I will now discuss how the soul responds to its spirit taking its own life.
The Soul’s Response to Suicide
The soul has an acceptance for all physical experiences. Therefore, to the soul, the act of suicide is one of many experiences in a human’s lifetime. The soul doesn’t judge it, regret it, or approve of it. The soul can only accept it from a place of love, much like a parent with unconditional love. The act of taking one’s own life becomes one more experience from which the soul will learn and grow because the soul learns from both sad and tragic experiences as much as happy and triumphant experiences.
The Spirit’s Response to Suicide
The spirit, on the other hand, characterizes a more human perspective to its physical lifetime, so the spirit views the act of taking its life with a level of self-reproach. While the spirit retains a spiritual objectivity now that it has left the physical body, it also preserves a firm memory of its recent human life to gain the most advantageous benefits from its human experiences. In this way, the spirit will identify with a level of sorrow and remorse around its final human act because connecting with those feelings adds to the spirit’s knowing, and spiritual knowing is eternal.
The primary source of the spirit’s self-reproach derives from its life review, which is the process every spirit experiences after leaving its physical body and returning home to the spiritual world. In the life review, the spirit learns how its choices and actions as a human affected other people and the world.
Therefore, once the person who has taken his life goes through his life review, he now knows the anguish and grief he has caused his loved ones on the earth plane due to the suicide. And this is likely the worst of his load to carry as his loved ones’ suffering has only begun. Even though he now exists in the spiritual dimension where there is no time, he knows that his loved ones in the physical dimension do experience time. And it will take a lot of time for them to recover from his suicide if they ever do in their lifetime.
In this way, spirits carry the weight of their suicide immediately following their passing, but only for a purpose. Since the act of suicide has many consequences, the spirit wants to know the experience from every angle. This is how they most evolve from the experience. If there were nothing to gain, the spirit would have the same objective acceptance of suicide as the soul. But the spirit-world experience is a continuation of the physical experience (we don’t stop learning from our human experience upon death). It’s like the aftershow that follows the main event—the human lifetime.
We Spirits Are Multidimensional Beings
There are many people who believe that spirits who took their lives as humans exist in hospital-like settings and require special care due to their low, almost-comatose energy and self-loathing atonement. That is not what my investigation into the afterlife has suggested. Quite the contrary, my investigation of the afterlife has led me to conclude that everyone who crosses over to the spirit world—despite the cause or circumstances of their death—enters the spirit world surrounded by love, joy, and peace. But let me explain this more deeply.
As spirits, we are multidimensional beings. So while there is an aspect of our reentry into the afterlife that deals with our suicide as I just described, there are also other aspects to our spirit that have nothing to do with the suicide. The fact is that our lifetime is defined by thousands of acts, not simply our final one.
This means that our suicide experience is only one aspect of our entire lifetime. In other words, everything that we accomplished in our human life that just ended—all the love we gave to people, all the good deeds we spread among humanity, and all the joy we brought to our family members and friends—is not lost simply because our last act was to take our own life. While the suicide is significant, and it certainly ends our spirit’s human experience, it does not erase all our good choices and actions that took place before we died.
In fact, for our spirit, it is exactly all these positive and wonderful memories of our life that ease any anguish of our final act that might exist. All the lessons that we learned, the mistakes that taught us wisdom, the pain that made us compassionate, and the epiphanies that awakened us remind us that the life we lived is meaningful regardless of how it ended. The big picture is that our suicide does not define our lifetime.
Understanding Suicide as a Potential
To fully understand suicide in relation to our soul, we must recognize that no one takes their own life if the potential for it did not exist. What I’m referring to here is our pre-birth plan, and one of the infinite choices made by the soul is to determine what “potentials” exist for this spirit’s human journey.
Amidst the infinite possibilities when designing a human lifetime, souls choose among the limitless options available as potentials. I use the word “potential” because free will dictates that nothing that is determined by choice can be definite.
On the contrary to potentials, physical attributes are definite, which includes whether we are born with one arm, red hair, or a birthmark, for example. Even your birth parents are predetermined. But suicide is a potential because it is free will that determines if a person will take his or her own life. Aside from the arguments one can make about being influenced by outside forces, mental illness, or addiction, carrying out suicide is still a free-will choice even if there are influencing factors.
I will write an in-depth article about potentials in the future, but let’s keep our focus on potentials in relation to suicide for now.
What this means is that the soul—prior to a spirit’s birth—agreed to the potential that suicide might be a possibility in their lifetime. Having the potential doesn’t mean the person will take his life. It simply means the potential for it exists. It means this person’s consciousness is such that he “might” consider it.
There are some people who simply would never consider taking their own life. It’s not in their nature. It’s not in their genetic makeup. In other words, it’s not a potential for their human experience. So for those who are wired in such a way that suicide is a temptation, it is only because suicide was something their soul chose as a potential for their life.
It’s important to mention, too, that we are not punished for acting on the potentials in our life. What kind of a sick and twisted spiritual system would it be if our souls gave us potentials that tempted us to act in ways that would eternally punish us if we gave into those temptations? I could see human beings designing a system like that, but not Infinite Intelligence (God/Source Energy/The Universe).
Potentials Apply in Relation to Other People’s Choices Too
So if we came into this life with the potential of taking our own life, that also means that our friends and relatives came into this life with the potential that they might experience losing a loved one due to suicide.
The souls of these people knew before they were born that this might be a potential experience for them as human beings. And they chose this as a possibility because it was an experience that perhaps they never had as eternal spiritual beings; that is, it was an experience they were willing to know because it would teach them about compassion, love, and respect for the human experience by knowing loss, grief, helplessness, and hopefully (at some point), surrender, acceptance, and forgiveness.
In a nutshell, if you know someone who took their own life, then your soul chose knowing this type of loss as a potential for your life. It didn’t mean it was definitely going to happen, since every human being has free will. But if you know this experience (and I have deep compassion for you if you do), that person in your life chose suicide as an act of his or her free will.
A Personal Example to Explain Potentials
I have personal experience regarding the subject of suicide. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I suffered from clinical depression. Clinical depression, in the way I experienced it, was due to a chemical imbalance of my neurotransmitters, as opposed to a reactive depression, which would have been me feeling depressed due to a loved one’s passing, the loss of a job, or dealing with long-term chronic pain—me reacting to an event in my life. Because of its chemical makeup, I’ll refer to this as chemical depression (my own term for it to assist in understanding the difference).
Chemical depression is a brain disorder that I inherited (genetic), meaning several family members covering generations experienced it as well. Chemical depressions that last for several weeks or more often need assistance (treatment, usually in the form of medication) to balance the imbalanced neurotransmitters. Understanding this might help you understand how easily a soul can create this as a potential. Choose the right parents and the genetics alone help to create the potential.
Reactive depression, on the other hand, occurs in reaction to events in one’s life, and typically can be overcome within days or a couple weeks. This is a very different experience than chemical depression (although it shares many of the same symptoms), and most people who experience it can overcome it on their own or with the assistance of therapy. It’s a much more complicated differentiation between the two depressions, which is not the point of this article, but these definitions are explained to help you understand suicide and the afterlife.
For clarity, it can be challenging for a psychiatrist to determine if a new client is dealing with a chemical-imbalance depression or a reactive depression. Certainly, for those with a predisposition (genetics) for chemical depression, it might be a reactive depression that initiates the depression, but the patient’s neurotransmitters were unable to bounce back to their normal, undepressed state. It’s complicated and beyond the scope of this article, but important enough to mention.
My suffering was severe enough that the depression debilitated me for five years because my doctors could not find a successful treatment. I eventually found a treatment that lifted my depression and has left me free from chronic depression since 1994, but I was challenged during those five years by the temptation to take my life.
During that time of my life, I dealt with what is called suicidal ideation—persistent thoughts of taking my own life. I therefore came into this world with the potential of taking my life. Likewise, my wife, Melissa, came into this life with the potential of grieving my loss in the way that only suicide survivors can know. The same is true for all my family members and friends.
In my case, I met the challenge by not taking my life, though I admit it could have gone either way at times. I’m grateful for the sake of both Melissa and me that I overcame that challenge, but I know it was an experience that both our souls were prepared to endure. That’s what human life is all about. I have no doubt that my spirit will be better off that I did not succumb to the temptation of suicide. At least I know my spirit won’t have to deal with the suicide-related self-reproach of experiencing my loved one’s suffering due to my suicide that I noted earlier.
The Many Facets of a Spirit’s Reaction to Suicide
I have now discussed the best and the worst of what a spirit will experience in response to suicide. Keep in mind that a spirit’s reasons for self-reproach are not a requirement and only exist for the spirit to extract the greatest benefits from this previous human lifetime, which include everything that a spirit can learn from the act of suicide. And when the spirit grows from an experience, so does the soul (the higher self).
The spirit’s reaction to its suicide is not a whole lot different from the way we feel about our choices here on the earth plane. It’s common to hear someone say something like, “Well, there’s one part of me that feels guilty about stealing that car when I was 17, but there’s another part of me that has learned from that experience and grown from it. So I’m also glad that I did it despite the fact that I went to jail for two months and brought shame upon my family. I’m now a better person overall for having had that difficult experience.”
In the spirit world, we are so multidimensional that there are countless parts of us that deal with every aspect of our choices, suicide included. So on one level, we’ll feel deep regret for taking our life. On another level, we’ll feel sadness and compassion for our surviving loved ones. On another level, we’ll feel gratitude for the life we lived. On another level, we’ll feel peace for being back home in the afterlife. On another level, we’ll feel pleased for our positive accomplishments in that lifetime. And on still another level, we’ll feel displeasure for poor choices we made that hurt others in that lifetime. We are multidimensional spiritual beings, so we experience our entire lifetime from many different perspectives.
Final Thoughts
What I’ll say in conclusion is that over the course of our many human lives, the probability is that each one of us may have been a murderer, a rapist, and a thief as well as a humanitarian, a guardian, and a philanthropist. And it’s quite possible, if not probable, that you took your own life during one of your many lifetimes. That means your soul, your higher self, was all those things in other lifetimes, yet you are still who you are today—even in this lifetime—because of what you as a soul learned and how you grew as a result of those experiences.
Viewing this from a different angle, since many of us may have taken our lives in a past lifetime, those of us who did are here in spite of it. So if you’re worried that your loved one who took their life is suffering some torturous eternal hell, from a practical standpoint alone, it might help to keep this in mind. Pray for him, of course, but find peace in knowing the key points of this article that I will repeat here:
1. Your loved one’s suicide is only one aspect of her life. There were many other aspects that made her life meaningful and beneficial to her soul, none of which are discounted by her final act. Said another way, while your loved one is aware and dealing with the act of taking her own life, she is also aware and benefiting from her many acts of love, compassion, generosity, playfulness, and courage.
2. Your loved one’s suicide was always a potential that was predetermined by his soul before his birth. It was a challenge for him to meet, and even though his free will chose the path he did, it is still a path that will provide his soul with lessons, wisdom, and compassion that he’ll carry with him for all eternity.
3. Your loved one’s soul has endured many lives and expressed its free will in many unflattering, reprehensible, and even shameful ways—just like the rest of us—but that is part of experiencing a human life. His choice to take his life during this lifetime is only one aspect of his multidimensional being, which means that he will also know the peace, love, and joy of the afterlife like everyone else, just like his soul has done many times after innumerable human lifetimes.
While this article is about the afterlife and not intended to answer the many questions that haunt suicide loss survivors following their loved one’s passing, I will say from personal experience as someone who knew suicidal ideation (and talked with many others who lived with it as well) that most people who take their lives are not intending to hurt their loved ones. Most see suicide as an escape—perhaps they are escaping the symptoms of a mental illness or addiction, or perhaps they are escaping having to face the consequences of something they did, something they interpret as so bad that they feel shameful or fearful about people’s reactions to it.
Unfortunately, in most cases, people who take their own lives are choosing a permanent solution to a temporary problem, yet they are not thinking rationally enough to recognize their issues as temporary. Irrational thinking leads to irrational choices.
In most cases, they are not trying to punish you. They do love you, of course, but their pain or suffering (in whatever form it has taken) prevents them from thinking beyond it. If you didn’t see the signs, it’s likely because they were hiding what they were going through from you. It serves no one to blame yourself for another person’s actions. And I know that people in spirit who took their lives do not want their loved ones to feel the burden of their final act.
I hope this article has offered you a new perspective that gives you added comfort and peace. I know the video I created over twenty years ago has been helpful to people, so I thought I’d update that information here on Bob Olson Connect in a new format you can read.
My warmest wishes and love to you,
Bob
PS, If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, call 988 or text 988 in the United States (or visit the 988 Lifeline website) or you can learn helpful information on the International Association for Suicide Prevention website. For international crisis phone lines, visit here.
Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of two books, Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and creator of the directory of psychics and mediums, BestPsychicDirectory.com. His latest venture is Bob Olson Connect, where you can read Bob’s articles before they become books.
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My son, Ben, passed by suicide at the age of 17 years old in 2002...following a year of an acute onset of mental illness. Prior to his illness, he was a delightful soul who made friends easily. His illness brought on someone I didn’t recognize and he became haunted, psychotic and dangerous. He heard voices. He took his life mere weeks after spending over 2 weeks in a psychiatric hospital. I found him. Needless to say, his illness & passing were pivotal in my life. Soon after he passed, he visited me in a dream. He was peaceful, serene - beautiful. My point in writing this comment is that suicide is so misunderstood. Those who pass by suicide are just like those who pass from cancer, a car accident or any other means. If Ben had taken his life at the start of his illness, I might have looked for “simple” causes, such as the breakup with a girlfriend etc. I wouldn’t have thought it was from mental illness. Years after Ben’s passing, I spoke with a medium that explained that my son’s death was actually heroic. He could have hurt other people while in his diseased state of mind. His soul did not want that karma - that wasn’t what his soul purpose intended - and, like a soldier jumping on a grenade to protect those around him, Ben took his life.
Even the word “commit”, as in, “committed suicide” is from a time when suicide was against the law and the surviving family members were punished and shamed in its aftermath. People don’t “commit cancer”. Murder is a crime committed against another person. Suicide is the only type of death where “committed” is used. Another word used with suicide is “sin”. A family member’s minister preached that Ben’s death was a “sin”. Such declarations heap more shame & despair on surviving family members and friends.
Dying by suicide, I posit, is the same as dying from a disease. Sometimes it can be an impulsive thought. I had a friend who explained her impulsive thoughts this way: she described a time when her computer malfunctioned. Her first thought was, “well, I better kill myself”. That’s not a normal thought process for most of us. But that was what plagued my friend. In the frenzy of her impulse, she never thought of how her passing would affect her family & friends. Suicide was an invasive thought. Because she had survived previous attempts, she took protective measures to hide instruments of harm so that she had time to get past those initial, harmful thoughts. I have heard so many suicide stories from working in suicide awareness and outreach. Suicide is shocking and, often, unexpected because we don’t understand the human brain well enough to diagnose early enough - or cure, once found.
All souls reflect on their lives and lessons when they pass. Those who die by suicide are no different - or worse.
These are my experiences and observations -
Dear Bob,
Sending much gratitude to you for this heartfelt and reassuring piece. As a Buddhist, I have always been concerned about the idea expounded by many Buddhist sects that the karmic implications of suicide are most often very dire – with rebirth in a lower, sorrowful realm (hungry ghost realm or hell realm) lasting for an unfathomable length of time in some cases – i.e. trillions or even quadrillions of years, before being reborn again in another of the traditional six realms of existence – hell, hungry ghost, animal, human, Titans, Deva. Wondering if you have spent any time exploring the Buddhist views on the subject? Many in the Tibetan tradition view suicide as a terrible waste of a (very) rare human birth and many of those Tibetan Masters have sat in meditation for tens of thousands of hours.
As a follow-on, I wondered what your experience of transmigration may have been. Put another way, have you come across any examples of people recalling past lives in other species or on other planes of existence - be they animal, plant or any other?
Would greatly appreciate your thoughts.
Thank you again!
Bruce