In the last two years, I've lost two male friends to suicide; the second one during yesterday's night. In the last month, several male friends divulge their suicidal ideation to me; with some attempting and another one having written me a letter before deciding not to go through with it. To these latter friends, I don't know how to say I LOVE YOU in such a way that if they were to brush against the literal enactment of Thanatos (the death impulse), they would be stopped in their tracks by the memory of being loved. I don't know if I even believe there's a human love, the memory of which, could stop the powerful compulsion catalyzed by Thanatos' grossest expression.

In the western world, the male suicide rate is three to four times more than the female suicide rate. With all the polemics surrounding a supposed male privilege, it seems such "privilege" does not translate into eros (the life impulse), at least not for the three to four times western male population who lack enough eros to choose life over death. And while there's an important social conversation to be ruminated upon here, spiritually, as I grieve today, I'm reflecting on the deep existential loneliness that confronts us all and pressures us with that archetypal human question, "To be or not to be?"

The truth of the matter, as unpleasant as it sounds, is that the very nature of our existence as embodied awareness is alone.

ekaḥ prasūyate jantur
eka eva pralīyate
eko ’nubhuṅkte sukṛtam
eka eva ca duṣkṛtam

Every creature is born alone and dies alone, and alone one experiences the just rewards of his good and evil deeds.

Aldous Huxley articulates it well in his Doors of Perception:

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all cirumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena: they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies--all these are private and accept through symbols (e.g. language) and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

This type of aloneness i'm calling existential loneliness because its ontological (fundamental to our existence) and not circumstantial. Rather you're a misanthropic hermit or a garrulous extrovert, at the end of the day, your subjective experience is yours alone and not a single creature of nature--celestial, terrestrial, or sub-human--has access to that privacy of consciousness. It is for this reason that suffering (as well as joy for that matter) can never truly be seen objectively-- in the sense that one type of suffering is objectively worse than another type--for the subject experiencing the suffering. Viktor Frankl says it brilliants:

[A] man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.

Therefore, when confronted by suffering and its question to us of our choice to live or die (To be or not to be?), is it so surprising that multitudes choose not to be? Is it so surprising that even those who choose to be externally, resign themselves to a type of death (nihilism?) internally, breathing like the bellows? As Thoreau puts it "most men lead lives of quiet desperation."  Few are those who translate Thanatos as egocide, i.e. as death to a certain way of being, so that a more expansive way of being can become (self help is based on this principle essentially). Fewer still are those who learn to confront their existential loneliness by learning to commune with God, that Being who is the ground or source of beings, like the one sun to its innumerable rays.

God is alone for there is no other reality that is self-existent; the Mystery out of which life springs, upon which life is sustained moment to moment, and into which  life returns in an apparent dissolution. All spiritual traditions petition humanity to learn the art of being "alone with the Alone" as the true panacea for existential aloneness. And notwithstanding the indispensable value of human love unambiguously expressed to one another, it seems to me that human love alone cannot withstand a tsunamic force of Thanatos' compulsion in one who has not learn how to commune with its Source.

There is much more to say to unpack these metaphysical ideas and their implications, but I want to end with some musings on grief. Krishna says it is a foolish person who grieves for the living or dying [see bhagavad-gita 2.11] for the soul is eternal, imperishable, unbreakable, insoluble, unburnable, etc. etc. [see bhagavad-gita 2.12-30]. What then looks like the death of the person should be tolerated as nothing more than sense perceptions misrepresenting the fundamental truth of life [2.14], viz. a change of outfit (body) for the soul [2.22]. Many contemporary followers of the gita when encountering manifestly grief causing circumstances, e.g. the death of a love one, try meeting those heart wrenching circumstances with utter stolidity, perhaps thinking it a spiritual flex to not shed even a single tear! I was certainly "trained up" (aka indoctrinated) in such a mentality and do find it challenging to allow myself to grieve for what is worthy of tears.

Arjuna deeply accepted all that Krishna taught as truth [10.14]. And yet when confronted by the death of his son Abhimanyu during the war (after hearing the gita), he cried pitifully. In jest, I've heard this scene explained as the power of ignorance, for even after learning the gita, Arjuna "lamented for what was not worthy of lamentation" [2.11].

For me, Arjuna demonstrated the medicine of grief needed for all human organisms, lest we risk becoming like some soul-less automaton incapable of empathic relatedness whilst being also capable of the most egregious atrocities all in the name of spiritual teaching. (As an aside, how is it that the religious, political, and scientific ideologues seem so easily duped into relinquishing common sense (like the need to grieve in this case) in favor of ideology). Still, how does reconcile the scene of Arjuna's grief with his integration of teaching about the deathless never-ending-ness of souls?

One may question why remorse for the loss of loved one is not deemed appropriate, for such behavior is seen even in great souls. Krishna anticipates that Arjuna might argue in this direction in the face of the strong possibility that his dear ones will depart, and he says they should not be lamented for. Knowledgeable persons know that the departed have merely gone elsewhere, as they do even in embodied life. Although great persons are seen to lament at time, this is merely the expression of their manifest (prarabdha) karma exhausting itself while they themselves know better and remain situated in knowledge of the nature of the self. The manifest karma of great souls expires without diminishing their greatness...great souls teach us to pass through it without identifying with it.--Bhagavad-Gita: Its Feeling and Philosophy, Swami Tripurari [2.11 commentary]

We're not machines living in a mechanistic world! We're closer to organisms living in a profoundly and immaculately symbiotic interconnected world whose physical and pyschological mycelium like threads unite us in near ineffable ways. When an organism forcefully looses part of itself or ingest some form of toxicity, that loss or ingestion inflames the entire organism and demands healing, lest the inflammation become its undoing. To lose a friend in this most bitter of ways demands grief as a medicinal expulsion of the inflammation caused (in the psychic system) by such a loss.

So I sat with my grief last night, and allowed my self to cry bitterly and it continued into my sleep. This is not easy for me due to "training" in stolidity, nor do I think i'm finished healing from the loss. But it's a start.

To all those who struggle in "quiet desperation," I have no words which, in their own right, have the power to touch you and confer solace. We stand with you, constitutionally, in the trenches of existential aloneless embattled with the delimma of how to say "Yes" to life inspite of everything. This solidarity is all I have to offer at the moment and also a heart to listen.

OM TAT SAT