Spirituality is a higher level of suicide

Questioner: Sadhguru, why with more prosperity, more facilities, more opportunities, does the tendency to commit suicide increase? And do animals commit suicide too?

Sadhguru: Generally, there are very few suicides in tribal societies. When you are struggling for your survival you won’t think of how to end it. This is because your whole energy, every moment of your life is focused on how to live. And thus no wonder that maximum suicides happen in affluent societies. Or, a society where one part is affluent and another part is miserable. If the whole society is poor, or have less, there will be no suicide, because their whole life would be only about survival.

When you are poor there is a hope. The poor man on the street today, he’s bought a lottery ticket, so he has to live for a month or at least, till the result comes because he’s got a big hope: “When I get these 25 lakhs, how I’m going to live?” After the result comes out there is the next lottery. That’s why they keep buying lotteries; even before the result has come, already he has bought another ticket and thus the hope continues and so does the life!

But for the rich man the lottery has happened, and he knows it doesn’t make too much of a difference. There is a deep sense of hopelessness. When you become hopeless, either you become suicidal or you become spiritual. That’s the choice you have. Whether you’re suicidal or spiritual, both ways you are trying to annihilate this person.

A normal suicide is when a person who is so identified with the physical body and dose not know anything other than the body tries to kill the body itself. Spirituality emphasizes on destroying the I-ness in you, the ego in you. That is also a suicide, but here you have become conscious of dimensions which are little beyond the physical and thus instead of committing a normal suicide the person commits suicide on a different level. The physical body is taken care of. So spirituality is a higher level of suicide. In tribal societies, there are very few suicides. The same goes for animal societies also.

For example, snake is one such animal that commits suicide. But suicide for them does not mean that they are frustrated with something and commit suicide. Infact, snakes have a very high sense of awareness about their energy. This is because it comes from a certain dimension which we refer to as Vyana where the awareness of body and functions are very high.

Why in yoga there is so much symbolism about snake is because, it is immensely aware of its body. Because of this, once its energies come to certain ebb, then a snake chooses a place and just sits there without seeking food. It realizes that, by seeking food and doing anything else, it cannot nourish its body anymore. So it simply sits without eating. Within 7-12 days it dies. It does not struggle to live beyond it. All its life, it struggles to exist, but once it realizes its energies have come to a certain point it refuses to eat and just sits down and dies. This is how a human being also should be